Hi.
The CONTRIBUTE file talks about the commit log messages. We generate the ChangeLog from the commit messages, but it is its own thing, and I think that making it more readable, removing redundancies, etc. is good. They mostly have different targets; we developers are now much more likely to use git log or gitk than go fishing into ChangeLogs, while people who downloads a source tarball only has the ChangeLogs. That's why I spend time cleaning them.
As for that particular example, I've mostly respected cases of "one line description non-ending in period", but when the one-line description is of the type
* file (blabla): some change"
I usually change it to
* dir/file (blabla): Some change.
for coherence with other entries that do not happen to be the one-line description of a commit.
I also remove (here and in a patch I'm working on) the one-line description in cases like:
Do XXX in function YYY of file ZZZ
* ZZZ: Do XXX in function YYY.
or
Do XXX in function YYY of file ZZZ
* ZZZ(YYY): Do XXX.
but I've left one-line descriptions untouched when they add information or are formulated differently.
That said, I do these changes that I feel make ChangeLog better, but anyone is of course entitled to do the same or revert my changes. Or, if there's some consensus that some of these changes are wrong, I'll adapt to whatever is preferred.
Thanks,
Juanma