How Github implemented its Pull Request feature [closed]

Question

I have question about GitHub — how they implemented Pull Request feature. Git SCM itself has git-request-pull commands. According to this answer GitHub can use git-request-pull and git-format-patch to do this.

How they implemented this feature? And what about Gitorious and Gitlab? How they did the same?

Pincer

IIRC, they are open-source. Why don't you just check it for yourself? Or ask "them" directly, I mean, whoever seems to be roughly-recently contributing to that part of Git? – Triboelectricity

Answer 1

They store the name of the branch from which you want to pull and generate diffs using git diff ^target-branch pull-head. When you accept the pull request, they simply run git merge pull-base.

They do not use git request-pull. There is even a discussion where Linus Torwalds insults them for it :)

Caecilian

You made my day by this link! Thanx alot! – Pincer

What about Gitorious and Gitlab? – Pincer

I have little experience with those, but I am pretty sure they do the same. – Caecilian

but with the diff, how can you know there will be merge conflicts or not? – Analiese

You need to run git merge to find out if there are merge conflicts. I'd assume that's also very close to what they do. – Caecilian