py3: drop redundant `u''` prefixes on string literals Strings are unicode on Python 3. These were rewritten by `pyupgrade`. It's arguably better to fix the `contrib` stuff upstream and then re-vendor it, but I don't feel like waiting for that, and then all of the regression testing involved to get a minor improvement in the codebase. It was last vendored 5 years ago, and will likely be a large change anyway to drop py2 support. Also, we've already made minor formatting changes to it locally.

--- a/mercurial/encoding.py	Mon Jan 06 14:07:43 2025 -0500
+++ b/mercurial/encoding.py	Mon Jan 06 14:15:40 2025 -0500
@@ -504,7 +504,7 @@
     chars = chars[:i]
     if leftside:
         chars.reverse()
-    u = u''.join(chars).encode(_sysstr(encoding))
+    u = ''.join(chars).encode(_sysstr(encoding))
     if leftside:
         return ellipsis + u
     return u + ellipsis