When I initially used this cookbook I ended up with a functioning gitorious UI, but almost everything else gave me trouble.
Added several new attributes, which were documented in README.md.
Switched from rabbitmq to stompserver. The setup that got installed wasn't working, and this avoids the need for both erlang/rabbitmq apt repo.
Put all the includes at the top.
Added .ssh directory to deploy_path, if this directory does not exist gitorious will not create it, and it will fail to add new ssh keys.
Added .bashrc to deploy_path that appends deploy_path/script to PATH.
Updated gitorgious version to 2.4.12.
Default gitorious host is now node.host, and the client host is defined as node.host as well. When using web_app it will redirect you if you do not use the configured host in Apache, so using localhost by default as the client host in gitorious caused issues.
Various updates to the templates to use new attributes.

I've tested this on Ubuntu 12.04, and after I added an admin using the create_admin script I ended up with a fully functioning gitorious installation that allowed me to login/pull/push/create projects, repos/add ssh keys etc. I did not test this on Debian but expect similar results.