It would be useful if there was some way of making mercurial repositories non-publishing. This simply amounts to including the following lines in the .hg/hgrc file. Unfortunately, there seems to be no way to access this from the bitbucket web interface:

[phases]
publish = False

Use Case

One might like to maintain a private repository for an online backup. Pushing to this private repository should not alter the phase of draft change-sets so that later rebasing etc. can be performed. (Pushing to a public repository, or a shared private repository, however, should change the phase to public.)

As second use case is code review: it is useful to push ones code to a fork, so that a code review can be performed on a pull request. At the end of the code review, one often wants to clean up the changes (rebasing) before the code is pulled back into the main project. It would be very useful to be able to mark the review fork as non-publishing so that the phases are maintained, guiding this later rebasing.

Reference

This was briefly discussed on the mailing list, then ignored:

https://groups.google.com/d/topic/bitbucket-users/XCC5jmYo5FU/discussion