Somehow this project has fetch and pull, but missing merge?

FWIW, pull is a fetch immediately followed by merge, so how was the pull implemented in the first place?

For my case:

I am running in-memory bare repo clone. Periodically I need to fetch updates for it and check the state of the file in repository. On bare repo this should be:

1. git fetch origin master
2. git merge origin/master master
3. head -> tree -> file object -> check contents

However in the absence of merge functionality I have to:

1. Fetch
2. .Reference("refs/remotes/origin/HEAD") instead of just .Head()
3. then lookup the file