[scottmsul]

I disagree. Renaming "pull requests" to "merge requests" isn't politically motivated, whereas this is a top-down change from political activists. I'm worried that society might go down a path where people can't push back out of fear of one's career or safety.

[userbinator]

Very related article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16454645

[jakelazaroff]

Political activists aren’t in positions of power at GitHub, so it’s not a top-down change.

I also disagree that it’s especially political. It’s a small name change to be more considerate. The only reason this is “political” — and “merge requests” wouldn’t be — is that for some reason a small group of people are very loudly offended by it.

[_y5hn]

A change from people in power is the very definition of top-down change. Words convey meaning.

It's hardly surprising the priesthood of developers rally against any changes to their sacrosankt nonsensical namings. Merge is different from pull/push though.

[jakelazaroff]

Policy changes can only come from people in power. I’m just saying the people in power at GitHub are not political activists.

Pull is literally an alias for fetch followed by merge. GitLab already calls them merge requests, which caused approximately zero drama, so we have empirical evidence that no one actually cares about these things when they can’t pretend to be offended by them.