rename upstream branch (half-)fails

converting one of my projects, the following commands are suggested:

salsa rename_branch "${project}" --source-branch=master --dest-branch=debian/latest
salsa update_repo "${project}" --rename-head --source-branch=master --dest-branch=debian/latest

it seems that the first command salsa rename_branch always fails and doesn't do any good either. the 2nd command does the actual change.