I was trying to figure out how to automate, in some fashion, the creation of release notes. My project is using CVS so I could get a dump of commit messages using cvs log. But the CVS log output is extremely verbose and certainly not suitable for management or other non-technical parties.
Enter StatCVS:
Among other things, the tool does a nice job of formatting the commit messages, excluding the files that had no changes and grouping commit messages intelligently.
StatCVS also provides statistics based on user. You can see how many commits each developer has made, when those commits were made, as well as files and the number of lines of code affected. While this might seem a bit Orwellian, it really is useful information for a team lead.