bugfix: Avoid starting incremental conversions from scratch
Keys and values in the state cache are byte strings, therefore a
lookup of 'tip' will always fail. The failure makes the conversion
start over from the beginning, but as fast-export is deterministic the
results are the same, just very inefficient. The bug has existed since
the port to Python 3.
This patch switches the 'tip' lookup to use a byte string which should
make incremental conversions restart at the last converted commit. As
'x' == b'x' in Python 2, this should be a backwards compatible change.
Bug reported and fix suggested by Tomas Kolda.
Fixes #258.