Funnily enough, within about a day of writing D3144, I ran into the
exception in practice. I spent some time trying figure out why I got
the "unknown revision" message when the node was clearly in the repo,
and then I finally remembered that I had just fixed that bug. Anyway,
even with the fix applied, the message wasn't ideal: now it would
instead be something like "abort: hidden revision 'K*}s!", because the
error message didn't go through the conversion to hex that happens at
the end of the try-block. Let's fix that by converting to hex before
re-raising.
(I included example output in D3144, which is apparently incorrect. I
suppose that must have been produced when the patch was later in my
stack of unsent patches, before I rebased it and sent it. Sorry about
that.)