Now let us suppose we had an update hook (in our pre-Gitolite setup) that prevented certain users from making changes to certain files. One way would be to write an update hook that checks for such files and use it as a VREF, as shown in the previous section. However, the list or pattern of files to be checked will need to somehow be encoded within the VREF code, or some other method of passing that information needs to be found.

Gitolite allows you to pass additional arguments to the VREF code. Let's say the VREF used is called NAME, then instead of merely saying:

-  VREF/NAME           =  @junior-developers

and making sure that the code for the NAME VREF knows which files we are talking about, you can say:

-  VREF/NAME/.*\.h$    =  @junior-developers

You'll see how this becomes really useful if you later find that another group of users needs to be restricted in a similar way, but for a different set of files. Let's say we have a set of technical writers...