How to Tell if Pull Request Has Been Merged

Question

So my question was kind of addressed by this post , but I'm still a little confused. Basically, I'm checking out a repo on GitHub, and I see that there are currently 34 open and 173 closed pull requests. My current understanding is this:

1. If somebody makes a stupid pull request, the maintainers will close it
2. If somebody makes a legit pull request, the maintainers may merge it, at which point the request is closed
3. If a request is open (legit or not) then that means the maintainers just haven't dealt with it yet (or are in the process of resolving conflicts)

However, a lot of the open requests in this repo are very old, even though they seem to make reasonable changes. This makes me wonder whether my 2nd assumption above is correct. So which is it, do pull requests close when they are merged, or do they remain open? And if they remain open, how can I tell that they were in fact merged, and aren't just in limbo?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Pull requests are closed automatically whenever the maintainer merge the changes through the web interface. If he merged using the command line, it will be closed as soon as he pushes the code back to Github.

So if a PR is still open, it means it is not merged.

Reference: Best-way-to-merge-a-github-pull-request

Answer 2

A PR with Open tag simply means it is not merged. The tags are legitimate and have definite meaning. Merged means it has been merged and closed and Closed simply means it has been closed and the code has not been accepted.

However, if the repository owner or collaborator has merged the PR from command line, then it will not be reflected on the web interface unless he updates the repository.