It must be clear by this time that Gitolite is a pretty powerful tool for managing Git repositories on a server. The most powerful tools, however, allow the administrator to add features that are unique to their site, and thus cannot be expected to be added to the product itself. For example, consider Git itself, its hooks mechanism (see man githooks for details) contains several predefined hooks, which the user can install on their repositories to customize Git's behavior at various points in the lifecycle of a commit, a rebase, a push, and so on. In fact, Gitolite's ability to perform branch level access control (as opposed to merely repository level access control) is entirely done by using Git's update hook.