Today a patch I sent to mercurial-devel was allowlisted. It is reproduced here for reference.

rebase: add boolean config item rebase.norebasesource

This allows to use rebase without recording a rebase_source extra field. This is useful for example to build a mirror converted from another SCM (such as svn) by converting only new revisions, and then incrementally add them to the destination by pulling from the newly converted (unrelated) repo and rebasing the new revisions onto the last old already stored changeset. Without this patch the rebased changesets would always receive some rebase_source that would depend on the particular history of the conversion process, instead of only depending on the original source revisions.

This is used to implement a hg mirror repo of SvarDOS (a partially nonfree but completely redistributable DOS distribution) in the scripts at https://hg.pushbx.org/ecm/svardos.scr/

In particular, cre.sh creates an svn mirror, upd.sh recreates an entire hg repo from the svn mirror (which takes too long to do in a regular job), and akt.sh uses hg convert with the config item convert.svn.startrev to incrementally convert only the two most recent revisions already found in the mirror destination plus any possible new revisions. If any are found, the temporary repo's changesets are pulled into the destination (as changesets from an unrelated repository). Then the changesets corresponding to the new revisions are rebased onto the prior final changeset. (Finally, the two remaining duplicates of the prior head and its parent are stripped from the destination repository.)

Without this patch, the particular rebase_source extra field would depend on the order and times at which akt.sh was used, instead of only depending on the source repository. In other words, whatever sequence of upd.sh and akt.sh is used at whatever times, it is desired that the final output repositories always match each other exactly.

diff --git a/hgext/rebase.py b/hgext/rebase.py
--- a/hgext/rebase.py
+++ b/hgext/rebase.py
@@ -547,7 +547,10 @@
         date = self.date
         if date is None:
             date = ctx.date()
-        extra = {b'rebase_source': ctx.hex()}
+        if repo.ui.configbool(b'rebase', b'norebasesource'):
+            extra = {}
+        else:
+            extra = {b'rebase_source': ctx.hex()}
         for c in self.extrafns:
             c(ctx, extra)
         destphase = max(ctx.phase(), phases.draft)
diff --git a/mercurial/configitems.py b/mercurial/configitems.py
--- a/mercurial/configitems.py
+++ b/mercurial/configitems.py
@@ -2770,3 +2770,8 @@
     b'experimental.inmemory',
     default=False,
 )
+coreconfigitem(
+    b'rebase',
+    b'norebasesource',
+    default=False,
+)