Git Pull vs. Pull Request

Question

I\'m new to using Git, so I apologize if this is trivial. I have a private repository set up using Github and EGit.

To update and merge my local re

Answer 1

A pull request is requesting the maintainer of a repository to git pull in some changes (as the name already suggests). GitHub provides an additional easy to use interface that simplifies review of such a request.
You don't need to use it to merge in some branch. But you can use it and it may be helpful to recheck whether all changes are ready to be merged. If you don't want or need that additional safety you can simply git merge the branch.

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git itself also has a command that creates a pull request, designed for the use in mailing lists. You can request the generation with the git request-pull command. In fact it is required to hand in a pull request for some projects using this command! The output of the command looks similar to this (taken from the official git homepage):

$ git request-pull origin/master myfork
The following changes since commit 1edee6b1d61823a2de3b09c160d7080b8d1b3a40:
  John Smith (1):
        added a new function

are available in the git repository at:

  git://githost/simplegit.git featureA

Jessica Smith (2):
      add limit to log function
      change log output to 30 from 25

 lib/simplegit.rb |   10 +++++++++-
 1 files changed, 9 insertions(+), 1 deletions(-)