When Git creates a new repository, either via init or clone, it will copy the files from the template directory (the default location is /usr/share/git-core/templates) to the new repository when creating the directory structure. The template directory can be defined either by a command-line argument, an environment variable, or a configuration option. If nothing is specified, the default template directory will be used (distributed with the Git installation). By setting the configuration as a --global option, the template directory defined will apply to all of the user's (new) repositories. This is a very nice way to distribute the same hooks across repositories, but it also has some drawbacks. As the files in the template directory are only copied to the Git repositories, updates to the template directory do not affect the existing repositories. This can be solved by running git init in each existing repository to reinitialize the repository, but this can be quite cumbersome. Also, the template directory can enforce hooks on some repositories where you don't want them. This is quite easily solved by simply deleting the hook files in .git/hooks of that repository.