valid regexes and how they are used

side-note: valid regexes

Due to projects like gtk+, the + character is now considered a valid character for an ordinary repo. Therefore, a pattern like foo/.+ does not look like a regex to gitolite. Use foo/..* if you want that.

Also, ..* by itself is not considered a valid repo pattern. Try [a-zA-Z0-9].*.

side-note: line-anchored regexes

A regex like

repo assignments/S[0-9]+/A[0-9]+

would match assignments/S02/A37. It will not match assignments/S02/ABC, or assignments/S02/a37, obviously.

But you may be surprised to find that it does not match even assignments/S02/A37/B99. This is because internally, gitolite line-anchors the given regex; so that regex actually becomes ^assignments/S[0-9]+/A[0-9]+$ -- notice the line beginning and ending metacharacters.

contrast with refexes

Just for interest, note that this is in contrast to the refexes for the normal "branch" permissions, as described in doc/gitolite.conf.mkd and elsewhere. These "refexes" are only anchored at the start; a pattern like refs/heads/master actually can match refs/heads/master01/bar as well, even if no one will actually push such a branch! You can anchor both sides if you really care, by using master$ instead of master, but that is not the default for refexes.