Preparing release notes with GitEdit

Created 10/3/2007, updated 5/18/2017

I was wondering what Junio uses to produces the release notes for Git. Looking at the AsciiDoc source reveals the following:

exec >/var/tmp/1
O=v1.5.3.3-6-g0bdcac5
echo O=`git describe refs/heads/maint`
git shortlog --no-merges $O..refs/heads/maint

So it turns out there is a nifty tool called git-shortlog which does just the right thing if you format your commit messages following the recommended conventions (one line summary followed by a blank line and then an extended description).

It can be used to print out some nice summary information about the number of commits per author:

git log --pretty=short | git shortlog -s