You may need to modify the procedure described earlier under some circumstances. This section will describe some of the problems that you may find and how to work around them.
Gitolite expects that all the files and directories inside $HOME/repositories are owned by the Gitolite hosting user, and that this user is allowed to write to all of them. If this condition is not met, both Git and Gitolite will be affected.
The most common reason for such a condition to be violated is that the administrator has copied some files (such as a bunch of existing repositories perhaps) as root. When files are copied as root, they are not usually given the owner and group ID of the directory in which they are being placed, but that of the original owner or the user executing the copy.
You can see this by running ls -alR on the repository in question; if the owner and group of all the files and directories are not git (the hosting user), then you will...