Hey everyone, I just stumbled across a pretty neat blog post on  
checkin comments:
http://www.redbitbluebit.com/post/Subversion-Check-in-Comment---Great-Practices.aspx

The post is advocating a format for checkin comments that should:
1) Make it easier to know what to write (since it's structured)
2) Make it easier to know what's happened in any given revision
3) Make it simpler to build and maintain the changelog...

A sample would be:
ADDED: Ticket x345 Image captions from alt text
FIXED: Parsing bug in image dialog that prevented interacting with it
CHANGED: Default behavior for images without alt text
DELETED: Unused option in the image dialog


Now, for most checking, you really won't have to get that detailed,  
since you won't have all four categories, it'll most likely mean just  
adding one or two words to the checkin text.  I've talked with Ethan  
about it, and I'm gonna try it out for my next couple of commits to  
see if it the workflow is comfortable.  I think it looks both  
incredibly simple, but still quite helpful...  I'll let you all know  
how it goes...

Doug