gitolite/doc/who-uses-it.mkd

# F=who who uses gitolite

>   >   If you're using gitolite and find it very useful in some way, I would
>   >   love to describe your use of it or add a link to your own description
>   >   of it here.  Of course, you can anonymise it as much as you need to.

The **Fedora Project** controls access to over 10,000 package management
repositories accessed by over 1,000 package maintainers [using
gitolite][fedora].  This is probably the largest *confirmed* gitolite
installation anywhere.  The whole [big-config][bc] thing was initially done
for them (their config file was so big that without the big-config changes
gitolite would just run out of memory and die!).

[fedora]: http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel-announce/2010-July/000647.html

The **KDE project** [uses][kde] gitolite (in combination with redmine for
issue tracking and reviewboard for code review).  Apart from the usual access
control, the KDE folks are heavy users of the "ad hoc repo creation" features
enabled by wildrepos and the accompanying commands.  Several of the changes to
the "admin defined commands" were also inspired by KDE's needs.  See [section
5][s5] and [section 6][s6] of the above linked page for details.

[kde]: http://community.kde.org/Sysadmin/GitKdeOrgManual
[s5]: http://community.kde.org/Sysadmin/GitKdeOrgManual#Server-side_commands
[s6]: http://community.kde.org/Sysadmin/GitKdeOrgManual#Personal_repositories
[kdera]: http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.kde.scm-interest/1437

**Prof. Hiren Patel** of the University of Waterloo is responsible for the
existence of the fairly popular "[wildrepos][wild]" feature.  The
documentation was pretty much written with his use case in mind, but of course
it turns out to be useful for a lot of people, as you can see from the
previous para on KDE's use of gitolite.

In fact, he surprised the heck out of me recently by saying that if it hadn't
been for this feature, he might not have used git itself -- which is a pretty
serious compliment if you think about the magnitude of the git project and my
little one-man show!

He explains his use of it [here][hiren].

[hiren]: http://ece.uwaterloo.ca/~hdpatel/uwhtml/wildrepos-in-gitolite/

**Gentoo Linux** has [just moved][gentoo1] their git repositories from gitosis
to gitolite. There are about 200 repositories, some of them are the so called
[overlays][gentoo2], official and unofficial/user overlays, plus several
developer and project repositories, used by more than 1000 people. That number
will be increased in the near future, as they are going to migrate some of
their CVS/SVN repositories there, plus they are offering overlays hosting for
users as well.

[gentoo1]: http://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-dev/msg_2812c9b9e768f64b46360ab17b9d0024.xml
[gentoo2]: http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/overlays/

**Nokia MeeGo** uses Gitolite internally, and has also contributed LDAP
specific code (see [contrib/ldap][ldap] directory for details).

[ldap]: http://github.com/sitaramc/gitolite/blob/pu/contrib/ldap

**kernel.org**, the official distribution point for the Linux kernel, is the
latest (as of 2011-10) high-visibility installation.  According to [this
email][ko-ann] to the lkml, kernel.org decided to use gitolite for access
controlling their git repos.  Their [FAQ entry][ko-why] describes at a high
level why they chose gitolite.

This move also prompted the first ever security audit of gitolite by an
outside party.  Gitolite did great; see [here][audit] for details.

In addition, kernel.org was responsible for a serious rethink of a few rough
edges in gitolite, and smoothing them out was fun (the "playing with gitolite"
stuff, making the test suite simpler, "deny" rules for the entire repo).

[ko-ann]: http://lkml.org/lkml/2011/9/23/357
[ko-why]: http://www.kernel.org/faq/#whygitolite
[audit]: http://groups.google.com/group/gitolite/browse_thread/thread/8dc5242052b16d0f

----

A general note: if you see the list of high-profile users above, you will see
that gitolite benefits as much as they do; possibly more.

color me happy...