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Comment by commodoreboxer | Hacker News Reader

"pull request" isn't really native to git. "pull" is. A pull request is literally sending somebody a message and requesting that they pull a branch from your fork and merge it. A "pull request" in GitHub doesn't really do a pull under the covers at all.

"pull request" is a more recognizable term, but "merge request" is more technically accurate for what GitHub and GitLab do.

And is it really jumping through hoops to just name it something different? I usually think of that phrase as implying something more arduous.

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https://git-scm.com/docs/git-request-pull

You just linked a shell script that writes an email.

That's a convenient generator for pull requests, sure, but a pull request is still a human mechanism, not a git mechanism. The "pull request" itself is still just a message requesting a pull, not some concept that git (either the commands or on-disk representation) is specifically aware of.

To that point, GitHub still does not use git-request-pull or even pulls to implement PRs, so the name is still not correct there. GitLab's naming is more accurate.

It came first, but what GitHub called "pull requests" is very unlike what git does here. Even Torvalds famously ranted about that.

"Merge request" is a much better name for what GitHub actually does.

I just think we should have standardized naming conventions in order to allow clearer communication, while the CS field is moving exactly the opposite way because every company wants to have their own, unique nomenclature. This is ridiculous and only creates friction.

Imagine mathematicians having ten different names for "a curve", half of them considered offensive because why not.

> Imagine mathematicians having ten different names for "a curve", half of them considered offensive because why not.

You’d be surprised to learn that mathematics has at least three different names for a function.

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