I have an open source project on bitbucket. Recently, I've been working on an experimental branch which I (for whatever reason) didn't make an actual branch for. Instead what I did was use bookmarks.

So I made two bookmarks at the same revision

• test --the new code I worked on that should now be abandoned(due to an experiment failure)
• main -- the stable old code that works

I worked in test. I also pushed from test to my server, which ended up switching the tip tag to the new unstable code, when I really would've rather it stayed at main. I "switched" back to the main bookmark by doing a hg update main and then committing an insignificant change. So, I pushed this with hg push -f and now my source control is "correct" on the server.

I know that there should be a cleaner way to "switch" branches. What should I do in the future for this kind of operation?