Comment 16 for bug 607895

Rodney, your branch isn't necessarily private because it's for a commercial project. It may be private because it is contains (or may contain) fixes for security vulnerabilities. For example, https://code.edge.launchpad.net/~launchpad-pqm/launchpad/production-devel is private for this reason.

You don't want to make this code available until you have publicly-available packages that provide it. One way of getting publicly-available packages is by building the recipe into a public PPA. (Another is by building to a private PPA and then copying to a public one.)