I wrote a small Ruby script that generates simple release notes from a pair of git commits. All it does is spit out a list of git commit summaries sorted by author and a complete list of all files that have been added, modified, or deleted between the two versions.

Pretty simple.

ruby release_notes.rb commit1 commit2

Note that commit1 and commit2 can be any git-recognized commit identifier, meaning you can use branch names, raw commit hashes, tags, and so on.

I could see this becoming a little more complex in the future. Right now it's just a script but it could eventually become a gem. I could see it potentially allowing for custom templates where the main power lay just in parsing various git output into friendly Ruby data structures for manipulation.

But that's all future-thinking for now.