jgitflow:release-finish is not deleting the release branch

Question

I recently finished merging a release branch to master and develop using jgitflow:release-finish. The build was successful.

But now I am trying to create a new branch using jgitflow:releast-start. But it is giving the below error.

[ERROR] Failed to execute goal external.atlassian.jgitflow:jgitflow-maven-plugin:1.0-m5.1:release-start (default-cli) on project <XXXXXXX>: Error starting release: Error starting release: a release branch [refs/remotes/origin/release/1.0.1] already exists. Finish that first! -> [Help 1]

It asked me the below question when I ran jgitflow:release-start and I entered it as 1.0.2.

What is the release version for "XXXXXXX"? (org.XXX.automation:XXXXXXX) [1.0.2]: 1.0.2

But still it is giving the below error. I am puzzled.

Questions:

• Should we delete the release-1.0.1 branch manually?
• If yes, I will losing the history. Is there any way to preserve that?

Answer 1

1) Should we delete the release-1.0.1 branch manually? 2) If yes, I will losing the history. Is there any way to preserve that?

According to gitflow, the philosophy behind this Maven plugin, release branches are meant to be temporary branches which should be deleted afterwards:

Now we are really done and the release branch may be removed, since we don’t need it anymore:

$ git branch -d release-1.2
Deleted branch release-1.2 (was ff452fe).

Changes for release preparation and complition are then merged, hence history of its changes is in most of the cases irrelevant.

However, a different approach is possible as a variant of gitflow (but obviously not directly supported by the plugin): keep a long living release branch, used for all releases and rebase it from the develop branch instead of creating a new one when ready to prepare/perform a release.

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Also note that the release:finish goal provides a keepbranch option:

Whether to keep the release branch after finishing the release.

Default value to false, hence by default it should not keep the release branch.