It would be great if the M2Release plugin would use the configuration described in this http://code.google.com/a/apache-extras.org/p/maven-scm-provider-svnjava/wiki/UsingWithReleasePlugin link, so as a result it will access SVN by SVNKit it turn (which is Java-based and auto-downloaded by MVN). Hence, this would be no need anymore to install SVN manually on all build slaves!