convert: replace revision references in messages if they are >= short hashes Convert will try to find references to revisions in commit messages and replace them with references to the converted revision. It will take any string that looks like a hash (and thus also decimal numbers) and look it up in the source repo. If it finds anything, it will use that in the commit message instead. It would do that for all hex digit sequences of 6 to 40 characters. That was usually no problem for small repos where it was unlikely that there would be a matching 6 'digit' hash prefix. It was also no problem on repos with less than 100000 changesets where numbers with 6 or more digits not would match any revision number. With more than 100000 revisions random numbers in commit messages would be replaced with a "random" hash. For example, 'handle 100000 requests' would be changed to to 'handle 9117c6 requests'. Convert could thus not really be used on real repositories with more than 100000 changesets. The default hash length shown by Mercurial is 12 'digits'. It is unexpected and unwanted that convert by default tries to replace revision references that use less than that amount of 'digits'. To fix this, don't match strings that are less than the default hash size of 12 characters.