The Different Meanings of “I take pull requests”

Years ago when I was in college and staying at my grandparent’s farm, my uncle rousted me up well after midnight because he could see headlights in our pasture. We went to check it out to make sure no one was trying to steal cattle (it’s very rare, but does happen) and found one of my grandparent’s neighbors completely stuck in a fence row and drunkenly trying to get himself out. I don’t remember the exact “conversation,” but his vocabulary was pretty well a single four letter expletive used as noun, verb, adjective, and adverb and the encounter went pretty quickly from potentially scary to comical.

Likewise, when OSS maintainers deploy the phrase “I take pull requests,” they mean a slew of very different things depending on the scenario or other party.

In order of positive to negative, here are the real meanings behind that phrase if you hear it from me:

• I think that would be a useful idea to implement and perfectly suitable for a newcomer to the codebase. Go for it.
• I like that idea, but I don’t have the bandwidth to do that right now, would you be willing to take that on?
• I don’t think that idea is valuable and I wouldn’t do it if it were just me, but if you don’t mind doing that, I’ll take it in.
• You’re being way too demanding, and I’m losing my patience with you. Since you’re clearly a jerk, I’m expecting this to make you go away if you have to do anything for yourself.