In-line ballast versus internal ballasts preferences?

I personally build all my fixtures with internal ballasts, because I hate having separate bits of equipment to run a single light..  all the stuff in my album of homebuilt fixtures is all internal...

What is your preferences?

Many small lanterns here (basically most of the ones with medium base) used to be external gear up to the 80s' or so. Remaining stocks were probably installed up to the 90s..early 00's

I dont mind it as long as there is no ignition voltage on the cable between the gear box and the lamp. i.e. Mercury lamps, or low starting voltage (1kV) HPS, or locate the ignitor at the lamp and not at the ballast

Pros : Smaller luminaires, sometimes allowing for more elegant designs

Cons : In case of short in the cable run after the ballast, the short circuit current will be limited, and the fault might keep arcing for quite a while without tripping any breakers. Very dangerous in a building built of flammable materials, tolerable in setups like outdoors where it won't do much damage anyway. With the addition of ignitor it becomes more likely to fail in the 1st place (5kV on a cable rated for 1kV at times of e.g. hot restrike)

However, most building codes allow the use of remote HID ballasts. Also grow lights use them extensively. My place of work had 16x400W M59 remote ballasts, a couple hundred of feet between the ballast and the lamp. I have never thought about the faults Ash describes...

I'd like to try one, I have several projects on my mind at the moment and some could use remote ballasts. Maybe I'll wire one up à la laptop charger. The problem is always the ignitor as all my ideas are for low wattage MH so there is no getting around it.

I'm expecting two M98 magnetic ballasts in the mail tomorrow, one of those might very well end up in a remote application, but I'll need a remote ignitor for that.

All my HID fixtures have integral ballasts at the moment. I have two table lamps that have the ballast in the base, however. The distance between the ballast and the lamp is only 12 or 14 inches (30-40 cm).