Tarek Ziadé
I've also said that I believed that it's simpler to include back wrt licensing if it's a code base that's under the contributors agreement.
What does that have to do with hg.p.o? You can ask contributor agreements if your code is hosted on bitbucket. There's no magical relationship between hg.p.o and contributor agreements.
Last but not least, distlib is the plan forward endorsed by python-dev,
Is it? I haven't seen a PEP or an official decision about that. Just because someone proposed it on a mailing-list doesn't mean it is "endorsed by python-dev". By the way, you can already create repository clones from the Web interface. They just won't have any fancy configuration (hooks).
This is really annoying :/
Why is it so? Why does being on hg.p.o have anything to do with you being able to work on distlib? As Georg said, this is not a professional service that happens to be offered by a company. This is run by volunteers, and I doubt any of us enjoys sysadmin-related tasks. Regards Antoine.