One of the things we do for the Cayenne project which has really helped the Cayenne team out is to create a Jira issue for all changes. This makes creating release notes (as well as tracking behavior changes) easy -- there's always a record of it in issue tracking system.
I'd like to suggest that MyFaces begins to do the same thing for Impl and Tomahawk. I don't consider it to be as important for sandbox components. As things stand, someone might fix an unreported bug in snapshot, but someone else using a released version reports it later, and no one (other than the fixer) knows that it's already been taken care of. Worse is the case where someone changes behavior, creating a new problem "somewhere" in the code, but no one knows who or exactly where short of searching through every commit message, and the original person changing the code isn't monitoring the discussion on the issue.
