I think a good approach to this when using git, that I've tried to keep in my own projects of late, is to keep your master branch only merge commits and curate

I think a good approach to this when using git, that I've tried to keep in my own projects of late, is to keep your master branch only merge commits and curate the merge commit messages explicitly to be human readable descriptions of the changes. I think it's entirely possible to generate good changelogs out of this and proper tagging, but there probably need to be a few less awkward tools for maintaining it than just directly using git commands.