Instead of making our developers use annotated tags, I just use the git log as a reference. This shows all the commits (minus the trivial ones) between a set number of tags back.

# tagsback=2; tagdiff=$(git tag | tail -$(($tagsback+1)) |tr '\n' ' '| awk '{print $1"..."$NF}'); echo -e "COMMITS BETWEEN $tagdiff\n"; git log --pretty=oneline $tagdiff | cut -d " " -f 2- | grep -v ^Merge
COMMITS BETWEEN 2014092401...2014102101

commit message 1
commit message 2
fixed some bug 
Refs #404885
some other message
#