looking at the code, i'm pretty sure this is only for the "inspect" command, and it seems to have always been broken (or the pub->priv logic was handled in more core layers for us, but i'm not sure about that).  for all the other commands, we parse the CL # directly, but for inspect, we pass it directly as a query.

we could rework UserActInspect to call GetGerrit directly on each CL, and then pass that down to FilteredQuery/etc... as an optional arg.

One (some?) of the interaction commands should also be affected, which was how I encountered this initially.  I'm not sure which ones exactly, but I was using assign, verify, ready, and abandon to automate some things.

reading the code, these should work for sure because they explicitly call GetGerrit() on each CL argument:
- abandon
- assign
- deletedraft
- message
- ready
- restore
- review
- reviewers
- sethashtags
- submit
- topic
- trybotready
- verify

these ones don't take CL numbers, so wouldn't be relevant:
- account
- deps
- mine
- search
- todo

that leaves:
- inspect

so if you could dig up that bad command that wasn't using inspect, that'd be interesting.

Ah, maybe it's just inspect.  I was using deps and the discrepancy in interface behavior is confusing:

% /usr/local/google/home/ayatane/chromiumos/chromite/bin/gerrit --raw deps '*377112'
% /usr/local/google/home/ayatane/chromiumos/chromite/bin/gerrit --raw -i deps '377112'
*377112

the idea with the raw format was so you could mingle multiple GoB in a single command (like marking a batch of CLs that span multiple instances)

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