The Economist and Launchpad

I agree. The current "rocketfuel" setup requires a pretty invasive modification of your machine's configuration - I would only recommend it for VMs or dedicated machines. I really wish companies would offer launchpad hosting (although I believe they'd have to use a different name due to trademark issues). Is anyone aware of any such services?

The private repositories are (last I checked) $250 / year / project. Launchpad.net's tools are nice, but I would favor github (largely because I haven't been impressed with bzr so far), unless you have a policy of only using services based entirely on free software (as a collaborator of mine does).