How do developers receive git pull requests?

Question

There are lots of tutorials about git pull requests (e.g. here and here) but they explain how to generate a pull request, not how they are received. If the upstream developer and I are using git at the terminal and I generate a pull request, say using git request-pull:

git request-pull master https://git.blah.org/project

How does the upstream development team know that they have an incoming pull request?

Answer 1

Git itself has no auto-communicating concept of pull-requests. If you Use GitHub or GitLab or any other Git hosting platform that supports pull requests, you open the pull request in the Web interface or via some additional command-line tool like git-spindle. Then the upstream user gets notified according to the hosting platform like receiving and e-mail or getting it displayed in the web interface.

Using git request-pull command just creates some text that you can e-mail or instant message or whatever to the upstream user that tells him "please pull from my repository" which of course only works if the user has direct access to your local repository to pull from.

You can also use git format-patch to generate a patch-set for your intended changes and mail those patches to the upstream user that then can use git am to apply your changes.

How an upstream project expects contributions depends on the upstream project and you have to ask them how they want to receive contributions.