Gitolite goes a little further than merely allowing you to customize it for your location-specific needs. Gitolite actually ships with customizations already in place for several optional features. Some of these customizations are enabled by default, while others are disabled, though requiring only a quick edit of $HOME/.gitolite.rc to enable them.

As a result, Gitolite makes a distinction between core and non-core Gitolite code. If you happened to look into the Gitolite source tree (under src if you cloned the Gitolite source code), you will notice several directories at the top level, and a couple of files. Of these, gitolite considers the following directories to contain non-core code: commands, syntactic-sugar, triggers, lib/Gitolite/Triggers, and VREF. Everything else is considered core.

Making this distinction also helps in deciding whether a new feature is to be added or not. If the feature requires change to core Gitolite, a lot more careful consideration...