view CONTRIBUTING @ 38855:7848f284b211

revisions: allow "x123" to refer to nodeid prefix "123"

When resolving "123" to a revision, we try to interpret it as revnum
before we try to interpret it as a nodeid hex prefix. This can lead to
the shortest valid prefix being longer than necessary. This patch lets
us write such nodeids in a shorter form by prefixing them with "x"
instead of adding more hex digits until they're longer than the
longest decimal revnum.

On my hg repo with almost 69k revisions, turning this feature on saves
on average 0.4% on the average nodeid length. That clearly doesn't
justify this patch. However, it becomes more usefule when combined
with the earlier patches in this series that let you disambiguate
nodeid prefixes within a configured revset.

Note that we attempt to resolve symbols as nodeid prefixes after we've
exhausted all other posibilities, so this is a backwards compatible
change (only queries that would previously fail may now succeed).

I've still hidden this feature behind an experiemntal config option so
we can roll it back if needed.

Differential Revision: https://phab.mercurial-scm.org/D4041

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).