Here’s my solution to this, based upon the solution from Erik Hjortsberg.

This will only get called by make dist or make distcheck and will only get updated when configure.ac gets updated, which is where I increment my release version numbers.

# In the top level Makefile.am
dist-hook: ChangeLog

ChangeLog: configure.ac
    git log --stat --name-only --date=short --abbrev-commit > ChangeLog