Come up with some way of automating generation of release notes in a useful format

We currently have manually generated release notes, based on commit logs. It'd be nice to have this at least partially automated. On one side, we can use JIRA to spit out text or HTML for issues fixed in a given release - go to https://issues.apache.org/jira/secure/ConfigureReleaseNote.jspa?projectId=12324412 and choose the version you want, and tada. That's definitely something that should be part of any release note generation, since it covers non-commit issues as well as code changes for JIRAs. But something that can pillage git history and spit out a useful format would be handy as well.

We've got some tooling here at Cloudera that we use for generating CDH release notes, focusing on the diffs between the upstream ASF release and what we actually ship (see http://archive.cloudera.com/cdh4/cdh/4/flume-ng-1.3.0-cdh4.3.0.releasenotes.html, e.g.) - but while we don't have a need for that particular behavior, there are bits in the tooling that could be useful - i.e., finding JIRA references in commit logs and fetching links/summaries/etc on those JIRA issues from issues.apache.org. I'll have to check to make sure we can reuse the particular code we have here in jclouds, but even if Cloudera won't let us for some reason, it wouldn't be hard to clean-room reimplement. =)