I work for a small company (<10 developers) where we use Svn and to some extent Git. We have no release system implemented. We don't tag our applications with a release numbers so as you can imagine, we don't keep track of changes between releases very well.

With this in mind I've been thinking about generating changelogs from the commit-comments. It doesn't have to be an awful idea if you implement guidelines for how to write comments. Or am I fooling myself thinking that colleagues will follow these guidelines? Most of them don't bother adding comments today but I'm hoping that will change if they become aware of how to formulate themselves and that you don't have to comment on every single commit.

Or would we it be more wise to gather information from our bug/project managing software and write the changelogs manually (which unfortunately is something nobody wants to do)?