The Art of the Pull Request

There is little argument that GitHub has revolutionized the way open source projects are managed. Gone are the days of hunting down a project’s maintainer and negotiating needed changes in the hope that your email with attached patch file was accepted into the master branch (although some projects still require such pomp and circumstance). This generally opaque process was replaced by GitHub’s fork + pull request model. You might say that git itself contains a robust pull request system but GitHub added the special social sauce and dead-simple pull request generation system making it the lingua franca of the open source community.