This is a pretty naive tool that uses a regular expression for
matching lines. It is based on a Google-internal tool that worked in a
similar way.
For now, the regular expression is hard-coded to attempt to match
single-line Python imports. The only commit I've found in the hg core
repo where the tool helped was commit 9cd6292abfdf. I think that's
because we often use multiple imports per import statement. I think
this tool is still a decent first step (especially once the regex is
made configurable in the next patch). The merging should ideally use a
proper Python parser and do the merge at the AST (or CST?) level, but
that's significantly harder, especially if you want to preserve
comments and whitespace. It's also less generic.