Seeing as how our two non-mainline distributions don't have real release notes published, I've built two quick and dirty perl scripts (yes perl! Fear the ops people!) to take the commit log from CDH and the Yahoo! changes files to spit out Confluence-style wiki output. Changing it to other wiki output shouldn't be too difficult.
99% of the time, it gets it correct, but sometimes weirdness happens and it will take some manual cleaning to get it perfect. Anyway, I thought these might be handy for other folks to help compare and contrast the differences between the two. Now it is pretty easy to see how divergent a given distribution is from mainline, how hard it will be for them to rebase onto mainline, etc. Another interesting data point is comparing the official bug description and the description in the commit log.... Have fun. [Files are attached to https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HADOOP-6628. I might improve them as we go along, but who knows for sure. ]
