Okay, I guess that is a feature. It generates a plain text file you can 
send to someone else via email; the person can respond by taking manual 
action on their git command line.

Definitely not the github pull requests people are used to.

On 12/4/2012 1:16 PM, MJ Ray wrote:
> Jonathan Rochkind <[log in to unmask]>
>> On 12/4/2012 12:10 PM, MJ Ray wrote:
>>> Really? I hoped if I wanted to do serious hacking, I could clone it on
>>> git.software.coop and send a pull request.  If you use github *and
>>> insist everyone else does* then you lose all the decentralised networked
>>> collaboration benefits of git and it becomes a worse-and-better CVS.
>>
>> A "pull request" is a feature of github.com.  There is no feature of
>> git-the-software called "a pull request".
>
> I don't think that's correct.  GitHub was only launched in April 2008,
> but here's a pull request from 2005:
> http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0507.3/0869.html
>
> Here's the start of the relevant page in the git software manual:
>
> [quote]
> NAME
>         git-request-pull - Generates a summary of pending changes
>
> SYNOPSIS
>         git request-pull [-p] <start> <url> [<end>]
>
> DESCRIPTION
>         Summarizes the changes between two commits to the standard output, and
>         includes the given URL in the generated summary.
> [/quote]
>
>> Which of course doens't stop you from sending an email requesting a
>> pull. A "pull", including from decentralized third party repos, is a
>> feature of git.
>
> It sucks that github doesn't accept emails of such git pull requests
> and do anything useful with them.  Ignoring the huge potential of
> email coordination seems like missing a big feature of git.
>
>> But yes, if you get used to the features of a particular free service,
>> you get locked into that particular free service. [...]
>
> If one is locked in, that means it has an exit cost, so it's no longer
> a free service.  The piper might just not need payment yet.
>
> Hope that explains,
>