Pull Requests

Development here on GitHub typically revolves around the act of making pull requests which essentially are requests to take a chunk of code and merge it with some other existing code. Pull requests can occur from within the same code repository, but its very often used across different repositories so that you have the main repository here and contributors each have their own to do whatever with.

Testing Pull Requests

When a user creates a pull request, Github will advertise the request on the target repository's "pull requests" tab which will contain the title, description and a detailed log of exactly what's going to be altered when the pull request is merged.

However, to actually test the pull request you will need to note where the code is coming from. At the top of the pull request page (like here) it should say something along the lines of "Ragora wants to merge 9 commits into OuterDeepSpace:master from Ragora:master".

This text is telling us that the source code is coming from a repository owned by Ragora on the master branch ("Ragora:master"). From here, navigate to the pull request creator's profile (click their name on the pull request page) and go to their repositories, looking for a repository with the same name as the target one (in this case, DeepOuterSpace). In the repository list, it should say that its a fork of the target repository. Once at the page of the source repository, ensure that you have the correct branch selected ("master" in this case) in the drop down on the page and then click "Download ZIP" to obtain source code for the programming that's trying to be merged in.