Git-flow: why an 'unable to push to unqualified destination' with 'git flow release finish'?

Question

Why am I getting an error about pushing to unqualified destination in the following?

$ git flow release start v1.03
Switched to a new branch 'release/v1.03'

(Followed by a bunch of other normal stuff.)

Then:

git flow release finish -Fp v1.03
Switched to branch 'master'
Merge made by the 'recursive' strategy.
 .gitignore |    1 +
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+)
Deleted branch release/v1.03 (was c08e706).
Everything up-to-date
Counting objects: 1, done.
Writing objects: 100% (1/1), 228 bytes, done.
Total 1 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0)
To git@github.com:petertheyeti/myprivaterepo.git
   e0ef1dd..29a2667  master -> master
Counting objects: 1, done.
Writing objects: 100% (1/1), 159 bytes, done.
Total 1 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0)
To git@github.com:petertheyeti/myprivaterepo.git
 * [new tag]         v1.03 -> v1.03

And then the error:

error: unable to push to unqualified destination: release/v1.03
The destination refspec neither matches an existing ref on the remote nor
begins with refs/, and we are unable to guess a prefix based on the source ref.
error: failed to push some refs to 'git@github.com:petertheyeti/myprivaterepo.git'
Could not delete the remote release/v1.03 in origin.

Everything seems to be perfectly fine when looking at github... that is, master has the new bits. But why this error?

Any clues?

Answer 1

I am assuming you are using the nvie version of gitflow.

When you do a push (-p) the software tries to delete the release branch on the remote. It seems you don't have the release branch, so it fails. It's a bug in the software.