[anonytrary]

> you need each commit to be as meaningful as a line in the changelog.

Not really, your changelog-from-git-log generator doesn't need to incorporate every single commit. The vast majority of commits shouldn't be incorporated in a changelog anyway, since fine-grained commits serve a different purpose. It could incorporate, for example, version-change commits whose messages serve the exact same purpose as changelog entries.

  git commit -m "VERSION 1.1.0 <user readable desc of changes since 1.0.0>"