You know what they say about solving a problem with regexs?
These tests are checking for 'sret' markers, and just searching for 'sret' sans deliminters. But that also finds the source file names so then explicitly excludes them. But there are other ways other instances of 'sret' can get there. In my case it was in the version string, because my usual set up is to make a local branch in a 'me/feature-desc' subdirectory, whose upstream is my trunk. And this ends up with the pathname in the version string. And guess what I'm fiddling with :)
ISTM that a better regexp would be making sure the 'sret' is preceded by a space. I also check it terminates with '<maybe-spaces>(', but we could also with something else.