Finally completed the replication updates on my new musicbrainz vm server. I downloaded the current version that is/was available (2016-12-20) and all the replication applied without any known issues.

When it reached the schema change, everything appeared normal.

attempted to process the first command git fetch origin and I received an error: fatal: Not a git repository (or any of the parent directories): .git

Thought it might be a missing dependency, so I tried cpanm --installdeps --notest . *and received the error *The program 'cpanm' is currently not installed. To run 'cpanm' please ask your administrator to install the package 'cpanminus'

Rather than messing things up, I decided it was time to submit a ticket.