Display Gitolite Errors in the admin-interface

Created by: ccoenen

I had a problem, where a user (email was: _macdev@example.com) was created in gitlab. The user (and his public key) were setup successfully. But as soon as this user was in place we weren't able to push to any newly created repos anymore. At first, we weren't sure where to look, but it turned out to be a problem in Gitolite, which wasn't visible from Gitlab.

I looked at the gitolite config, which seemed fine, but the compiled config didn't. We found out about the error when we cloned the gitolite-admin.git and tried to push back to the server. The error-message was:

rails@git:/tmp/gitolite-admin$ git push
Counting objects: 7, done.
Delta compression using up to 2 threads.
Compressing objects: 100% (3/3), done.
Writing objects: 100% (4/4), 364 bytes, done.
Total 4 (delta 1), reused 0 (delta 0)
remote: 
remote: ***** ABORTING *****
remote:         bad username '_macdev_example_com_1330350480'
To git@git:gitolite-admin.git
   b8ee8e1..bec4a69  master -> master

Basically, there's two parts to this request:

• I suppose, it's the leading underscore, that's throwing off gitolite, but that's just speculation. Please make sure, the username is validated according to gitolite's standards.
• It would be great to have error-messages that arise from gitolite somewhere in Gitlab. Otherwise, you end up chasing errors a few hours (or days) later.