If I were a boost library owner, I would be quite annoyed if someone submitted a pull request against master, even though regulations stipulate that all modifications must go through develop in order to cycle through tests. This can create headache for the maintainer, whose working branch may be heavily modified. In my experience maintaining git repos, I would expect contributors to be up to par with the develop branch. They need to know the changes, else they may not even be contributing anything useful. If that is too much work for someone, then that person's code will probably not get merged. Sure, they can make an issue / bug report or submit a pull request, but I'll at most cherry pick it to dev and most likely find a better solution myself. Because of the wide scope in which boost is used, it makes sense for all pull requests to go through develop, and because of that it also makes sense that the default PR branch is develop. cheers, Rich