Pulling Request Form Make: Fill & Download for Free

You’re 100% correct that GitHub used the wrong terminology. Here’s more or less what happened historically:When Linus Torvalds was inventing git for managing the Linux kernel, they had a social convention that you’d write code on your local machine and then ask other people (e.g. Linus) to pull it and have a look. This was the original “pull request”. It’s exactly what it sounds like. You might issue a pull request because you’re new and want to make sure you’re following conventions. It could be because you’re testing out a new feature and want to make sure it looks good before doing more work. It could also be because you’re asking Linus to merge it into Linux, if you’ve gotten that far. The “request to pull” was the important part.GitHub more or less took that concept, and then tightly integrated it with the Merge function. Most people work on a variation of the git-flow workflow, so most people move immediately from a pull request (plus or minus some peer-review code changes) directly to merging. As you said, this really makes their workflow a “merge request”, not a “pull request”. But you can still open a GitHub Pull Request for review, and then Decline to Merge it (or ignore it). So the old functionality is there.GitLab’s terminology is correct. You are sending a request for your code to be merged.As of this answer, GitHub (and git-flow) have become so popular that they have become the standard. Most developers can’t even tell you the difference anymore. For instance, git has a command “git request-pull”. This command is rarely used. If an interviewer who is a seasoned GitHub user asks you “In git, what is a pull request?” and you respond by explaining the “git request-pull” command (which is 100% correct for the question), you will probably lose points because you didn’t give the GitHub answer.The best answer as always is know your audience, and use the right tool for the job (even if it means explaining things in GitHub terms when they think they’re asking for git terminology).

50 pages of this:Don’t.Reformat.Code.In.Feature.Pull.Requests.Look, I don’t really care about formatting. As long as it isn’t a gratuitously stupid format, I’m willing to work with it. And if your editor automatically reformats the files you are actively working in, I’m even willing to accept whitespace changes to relevant files.But DO NOT set up your IDE to auto-format THE ENTIRE PROJECT, and then push a PR with a 3 line feature change and 500 lines of filler.It’s annoying.It makes it incredibly difficult to figure out what changed.You are going to cause merge conflicts for everyone else who is working in the projectYou will clutter the git history, so ‘git-annotate’ will show your whitespace commit, not a meaningful message.Most importantly, it is annoying.Let’s think of some real world analogs:You invite a guest over to your house. Guest uses the bathroom. Guest notices some hair on the sink. Guest uses a paper towel to wipe it up. Cool! Polite!You invite a guest over to your house. Guest uses the bathroom. Guest walks upstairs to master bedroom, and begins re-folding clothes. Bad! Bad guest!If you must reformat a large codebase, announce it to your team like this:HEY GUYS. I’M ABOUT TO BE REALLY ANNOYING AND FIDDLY.INSTEAD OF LEARNING GOOD COPING TECHNIQUES FOR MY ANXIETY AND OBSESSION, I AM GOING TO REFORMAT THE ENTIRE CODE BASEPLEASE PLEASE LET ME KNOW IF YOU HAVE OUTSTANDING PRS OR BRANCHES SO I CAN NOT CLOBBER THEM WITH STUPID WHITESPACE CHANGESI WILL NEVER, EVER SUBJECT YOU TO THIS POINTLESS ACTIVITY EVER AGAINThen, submit the reformat as a PR WITH NO OTHER CHANGES, merge it IMMEDIATELY, and go back to doing useful work.And ask yourself whether that was really worth it.

Sloth: Nah, the code seems to run just fine. No need for comments or automated tests.Lust: Hey, this new urgent project is the perfect chance to try out that new cool framework everybody’s talking about!Envy: The other team’s moving faster than us. Better not help them out if they have problems integrating with our code.Gluttony: I need to iterate this object’s keys. I should probably import this 1.5MB library to do it.Pride: Reading this design pattern book made me a so much better developer than my colleagues! I’ll make sure to use each and every pattern in the book on my next project.Wrath: Screw it, this hotfix is going straight to production!Greed: What’s this, a pull request? Rejected! This is MY project!