re: changelogs and cvs2cl/rcs2log
Autogenerated Changelogs are probabaly more than adequate for projects with one or two developers, but for larger projects (say, the Gimp), the extra context that a hand written changelog provides can be very useful.
Namely because hand written changelogs tend to document what the author intended to do, where cvs logs document what you actually changed. Especially useful in the "did adrian forget to commit all the new files again?" scenario.
Rather or not that is worth the effort is another question.