RELEASE NOTES

You've studied the Git/hacks and built a ton of features, fixes, and updates to your codebase in a sprint worthy of Usain Bolt. Now it's time to create some release notes - which in the tradition of open source is stored in the RELEASE_NOTES file of your project.

Since your team follows the best practices of writing good commit comments and also creating appropriate branches and pull requests, then it's a simple matter of letting git tell you what's in the release. Of course you can amend or add to it as needed.

First, study git/log for how to use the log command.
Optionally, if you are adopting a formal process for the first time and do not want to go all the way back in time to publish your release notes, you might need to figure out the say the last parent branch where you want to 'start' your notes. See Git/hacks
Iterate on git log commands to find the one that works for you. E.g. git log --stat or git log --pretty between the prior branch/tag and HEAD (or current release tag)

In the final analysis, use --no-merges
to show the whole commit history, but skip any merge commits so that the Release Notes are not cluttered with workflow items.

git log --no-merges --format="%(decorate:prefix=,suffix=%n,tag=%n## Meza ,separator= )* %h (%as) %an: %s %b" 39.5.0...HEAD > RELEASE_NOTES-UPDATE.md generates a pretty good update to the RELEASE_NOTES since v39.5.0