Someone did not manage to perform the release with mvn:release plugin.
He re-install almost everything: maven (wiping out his repository as well), git, java. None of this worked out. The maven release prepare phase still persisted to not performing the commit whereas the tag was ok.
We eventually checked out the maven plugin code. With the help of the maven logs, we identified that the plugin did not
manage to get the change set from git status. In fact, the git status performed by either command line or the maven
release plugin was adding some chars around the files in the output stream. Subsequently, the maven program, which
analyze the standard output to get the change set was not able to parse this entry.
The modified output was because of a shell syntax coloring plugin that the developer was using. There is no magic in software, just side-effects hard to link with a human brain. Add more brains (not smartest ones) and you maximize the chance to defuse the magic.