Deprecating a Confusing Attribute in the Pull Request API

EDIT: As of January 2017, we have decided not to deprecate this field for REST API.

When you get the details for a Pull Request from the API, the response provides everything there is to know about that Pull Request. In addition to the useful information provided in the API response, the JSON also includes the merge_commit_sha attribute. This attribute is a frequent source of misunderstanding, and we aim to remove the confusion.

To help current API consumers, we've documented the attribute for improved understanding.

To protect future API consumers from this confusion, we have deprecated the merge_commit_sha attribute, and we will remove it in the next major version of the API.

As always, if you have any questions or feedback, please drop us a line.