Description Max Hohenegger 2015-08-25 06:45:21 EDT

Mathias reported the following behavior:
If a repository already contains a commit and a master branch and the user chooses a non-default name e.g. "master1" for the master branch this branch doesn't exist at that point. If later a release is finished gitflow tries to switch to the non existing non-default master branch "master1". Since this doesn't exist it raises an internal error:

An internal error occurred during: "Finishing release...".
No branch 'master1' found.

https://git.eclipse.org/r/#/c/54282/1

The reference implementation (1.9.0-dev.33 (AVH Edition)) behaves as follows:
$ git init
Initialized empty Git repository in tmp_foobar/.git/
$ touch foobar.txt
$ git add foobar.txt
$ git commit -m "foobar"
[master (root-commit) b257519] foobar
 1 file changed, 0 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
 create mode 100644 foobar.txt
$ git flow init
Which branch should be used for bringing forth production releases?
   - master
Branch name for production releases: [master] master1
Fatal: Local branch 'master1' does not exist.

I think at the very least, EGit should behave the same way, and not let the initialization finish, if the specified master-branch does not exist.
For convenience, we could also offer to create the branch on demand.

This came up during implementation of 475293.