A tag message can represent a summary of the changes, not a specific step like commits do.
The changes happens between two tags.
Actually, if your commmit messages are well written, you could extract from them your changelog: see "Very Easy Changelogs with Git"
git log 1.0.0...1.1.0 --no-merges --pretty=format:'<li> %s — %cn • <a href="http://github.com/<username>/<repo>commit/%H" target="_blank">%h</a></li>'
That can generate a changelog HTML page similar to http://mun.ee/Changelog.
That way, you don't have to version and maintain a separate ChangeLog.md
file.
Note: starting git 2.0.x/git 2.1 (Q3 2014), the name of the tag will be part of the default prompt message.
See commit d78f340 by (mirabilos
):
builtin/tag.c
: show tag name to hint in the message editor
Display the tag name about to be added to the user during interactive editing.