How do I get a list of commit comments from CVS after the given date or change?

The short answer is ... use subversion or git instead of cvs, and you will get your answer pretty quickly.

You may have made a bunch of changes to a number of files in a project, and made sure that every commit (usually at the file level) was accompanied by a comment of what was changed.

Then you may have asked yourself, is there a way to get a list from CVS of these comments on changes since some particular version?

Well, I had the same problem and here is how I quickly got all of the comments out of cvs from a given revision until the latest:

$ mkdir ~/repo
$ cd ~/repo
$ mkdir cvs
$ cd cvs
$ scp -pr geek@avoid.cvs.org:/cvs/CVSROOT .
$ mkdir -p my/favorite
$ cd my/favorite
$ scp -pr geek@avoid.cvs.org:/cvs/my/favorite/project .
$ cd ~/repo
$ mkdir -p ~/repo/svn/my/favorite/project
$ cvs2svn -s ~/repo/svn/my/favorite/project/src ~/repo/cvs/my/favorite/project/src
$ mkdir ~/work
$ cd ~/work
$ svn checkout file:///home/geek/repo/svn/my/favorite/project/src/trunk ./src
$ cd src
$ # get the comments made from revision 5 until today
$ svn log -r 5:HEAD
$ # get the comments made from 2010-07-03 until today
$ svn log -r {2010-07-03}:HEAD

The basic idea is to just use svn or git instead of cvs :-)
And that can be done by converting the cvs repo to svn or git using cvs2svn or cvs2git, which we should be doing anyway. It got my my answer within about three minutes because I had a small repository.

Hope that helps.