CONTRIBUTING

show: use consistent (and possibly shorter) node lengths

`hg show` makes heavy use of shortest() to limit the length of the node
hash.

For the "stack" and "work" views, you are often looking at multiple
lines of similar output for "lines" of work. It is visually appeasing
for things to vertically align. A naive use of {shortest(node, N)}
could result in variable length nodes and for the first character of
the description to vary by a column or two.

We implement a function to determine the longest shortest prefix for
a set of revisions. The new function is used to determine the printed
node length for all `hg show` views.

.. feature::

   show: use consistent node length in views

Our previous shortest node length of 5 was arbitrarily chosen.

shortest() already does the work of ensuring that a partial node
isn't ambiguous with an integer revision, which is our primary risk
of a collision for very short nodes. It should be safe to go with the
shortest node possible.

Existing code is also optimized to handle nodes as short as 4.

So, we decrease the minimum hash length from 5 to 4.

We also add a test demonstrating that prefix collisions increase the
node length.

.. feature::

   show: decrease minimum displayed hash length from 5 to 4

Differential Revision: https://phab.mercurial-scm.org/D558

Our full contribution guidelines are in our wiki, please see:

https://www.mercurial-scm.org/wiki/ContributingChanges

If you just want a checklist to follow, you can go straight to

https://www.mercurial-scm.org/wiki/ContributingChanges#Submission_checklist

If you can't run the entire testsuite for some reason (it can be
difficult on Windows), please at least run `contrib/check-code.py` on
any files you've modified and run `python contrib/check-commit` on any
commits you've made (for example, `python contrib/check-commit
273ce12ad8f1` will report some style violations on a very old commit).