Thanks for your response, Marc-Andre. I'd like to close this topic now. I'm not sure how to get you a "summary of changes", but I think you can ask Fredrik directly (Martin annonced he's away on vacation).
One thing you can do is pipe the output of "cvs log" through tools/scripts/logmerge.py -- this gives you the checkin messages in (reverse?) chronological order.
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)