As a true open-source zero timer, I can't quite figure out what PR means. My gut was "pull request" but it sounds like you're "committing a fix" at this point, so I suppose "push request" might be the answer, but it's an ambiguous pair of letters.
That's tied up with how git works, which is a huge mess.
You really do "commit a fix" but you commit it to your own git repository, then you make a "pull request" to the owner of the main repository, asking them to pull in your fix.
That's actually not true. git-pull (which is where the pull request comes from) is in the git manpages. Specifically it is: Fetch from and integrate with another repository or a local branch. Which is basically a git fetch and merge from the submitters repository to the repository they are submitting to.
EDIT: Admittedly if you are talking specifically of the request part, then you are correct. However the name comes directly from git's pull command which is a feature of git.
Pull-request makes sense in Github, because the typical work-flow for open-source on Github is to fork the repo you want to contribute to. Hence, the maintainer has to pull the code from you.
Merge-request makes more sense in Gitlab because they're main use-case is as a self-hosted internal tool where developers most-likely are pushing all of their feature branches to a central repository and asking for the branch to be merged into the mainline branch.
I don't want to nitpick but for a Git beginner (not necessarily you but others reading here), it's important to know that "pull request" is really a Github concept, not a Git one.
If you're being picky, then I can be picky too: the concept of a "pull request" isn't defined in that manpage, only the command "request-pull" is. A "pull request" is an entity in itself.
The command may exist within git, but it's not a part of most people's git workflows. "Pull Request" is a term that's far more commonly attributed-to and associated with tools like GitHub, Gitlab, Bitbucket etc.
Did you know that git has the ability to send patches via email, built in [1]? Git has a lot of functions that the majority of people don't use.
The claim was that a pull request is not a git concept, I think that's demonstratively false. I won't deny that GitHub popularized it, but they have by no means invented it.
It says Linus (and other kernel maintainer) will want a pull request from you if you want to contribute code, yet he thinks GitHubs version of pull request is, well, lacking (http://www.wired.com/2012/05/torvalds_github/)
You're being ridiculously obtuse here. A 'pull request' is simply the result of calling the git 'request-pull' command. That's just how english works, because the result of 'requesting' is a 'request', so the result of 'requesting a pull' is a 'pull request', in the same way that the result of 'ordering a pizza' is a 'pizza order', and if git had an 'order-pizza' command, it would result in 'pizza orders'.
