why a completely new version?

Gitolite started life as 400 lines of perl written on a weekend because I was quickly losing control of my projects at work, exacerbated by git newbies doing all the wrong things. I really needed it!

That little 400 line thing is now a huge bunch of programs that do all sorts of things (I mean, rsync access control in a git related program? WTF!), because it kinda just grew while I wasn't looking.

So, briefly, here are the advantages of g3:

Anyway you get the idea.

The point is not that you can do all these cool tricks. The point is they are possible because of the redesign. There is no way on God's green earth I could have done this with the old code.