If npm is down, it should be easy to try that again, without having to delete tags and what not. If a commit message ends up wrong, it should be possible to fix that and go from there again.

Working on changelog and contributors is super painful right now, since our fake-project has no commits nor issues, and while we could generate both, we're not going to have trac issues. Testing with jquery-ui I currently remove big chunks from the tasks in release.js, but since _cloneRepo also does npm install, its gonna take a while anyway.

One option we should consider is exatracting the changelog and contributors generation into a separate module. It just writes two files and doesn't need to commit anything, so lends itself well to unit test automation.

If we don't want to extract, we should at least come up with a way to run those methods directly, without all the slow setup.