See MRELEASE-35 for details. Here's the patch: I fixed the tag and checkout commands. Other commands may need to be fixed for other purposes, but I didn't try to. The patch comes with basic unit tests (for tag command not checkout command, as the fix is identical) and I tested the patch locally doing a release of a project onto a ssh based server. Both release:prepare and release:perform now work. I don't give rights to Apache with regard to reusing the code. Kidding...