We mentioned earlier that some servers can have local repositories, say if the conf file does not specify Gitolite mirror options for those repositories. However, local repositories are really of interest only if each server can have its own set of them. For example, say the folks on Ganymede wish to have a local repository called ganymede-news that they intend to use internally. Adding that to the conf file would create such a repository on Jupiter and Callisto as well; even if no one used it, it's ugly, unnecessary, and cause for future confusion. We would like to prevent this, but since the same gitolite-admin repository, with the same conf/gitolite.conf file and other files, is pushed to all the slave servers, it seems difficult to do so.

The feature that makes this possible is HOSTNAME substitution. Specifically, whenever Gitolite encounters the string %HOSTNAME (followed by a non-word character; that is, a character other than alphabets,...