"trying out" gitolite with minimum impact on a system

(This is kind of a record for me, 2 gitolite related emails to the git ML in less than a month)

If you were in the position of vaguely thinking gitolite may be useful to you but lacked the time to actually install it to try things out, this may help.

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Some folks want to be able to try gitolite's access control features, play with the configuration language, and so on, but to actually *install* it seems like a "commitment" of some kind.

Gitolite has always had the ability to be installed *entirely* within one Unix userid. Plus, the homegrown test suite I've been using for a while now has always simulated different "gitolite users" with a bit of ~/.ssh/config magic.

So I just combined the two, and made the client also be on the same Unix userid, resulting in this: http://sitaramc.github.com/gitolite/t/README.html#_playing_with_gitolite

Briefly, it boils down to this: create a user, log in as that user, clone gitolite, run *one* command. Done.

After that, entirely within that user, you have an admin user and six normal users, to do with as you please. You emulate different users simply by using a different username in the URL, like "git clone u1:reponame" versus "git clone u2:reponame".

This gives you a chance to play with the myriad access control features gitolite has.

When done, delete that user and your system is back where it was.