[ratherbefuddled]

In my experience its unlikely this will be complete or accurate on any project maintained by a team of more than a couple of people.

Common practice for a long time has been to include a ticket id in the commit and then use a script to pull all the ticket ids from the commits since the last release and pull the (user facing) release note info from ticketing system.

Of course you don't want commit messages going to users but you don't want to rely on handcrafted lists either. Particularly when a release as far as a customer is concerned is infrequent and contains changes from many repos.