It is generally seen as best practice for a project to keep a changelog as this gives people who interact with the project a easy why to see what has changed between releases. The problem is there is no real one size fits all solution to how changelogs should be maintained, some projects may have a text file that developers manually edit whenever something is changed with the project while others may parse this out of of their version control tool and auto generate one.
Last weekend, August 22-23, I attended Drupal Camp Asheville for the first time. This was also the first time giving a talk at a Drupal camp, after going to various camps in the past year and even attending Drupalcon Austin I noticed that most, if not all, of the talks on version control, let alone on Git, were focused on beginners. While I’m not saying this is a bad thing, people should be giving these talks as version control systems is something people need to know.