This page contains some research references on which CHANGES.txt / NEWS.txt format is most universally supported. See AutoupdateChangelog for what's currently supported by freshcode.club.

current

• CPAN::Changes::Spec is an established format, only comprised of version numbers and enumerated changes.
• keepachangelog.com - Don’t let your friends dump git logs into CHANGELOGs™ advocates for a Markdown-style release notes scheme.
  • Interesting find here: vandamme ruby gem to extract from NEWS.txt / NEWS.md formats with # 1.2.3 / 2014-07-01 headings.
• Fabrizio Regini: Something new about changelogs documents some more recent Markdown-inspired changelog formats, optional author tagging.
• Robot Operation Systems REP 132 entitles sections with version number and ISO timestamp in parens; adds a hyphen-line, and enumerates changes as usual.
• WP: Release Notes favours a "Version 1.2" heading and enumerates changes with - for removals, + for additions, * for changes.
• Semantic Release Notes v0.3 currently advises only on the Markdown structuring, does not prescribe version numbers or timestamp headings, but prepares for XML/JSON mappings.

outdated

• WP: Changelog describes only a VCS changelog dump without version number
• GNU project NEWS-Files follow the same scheme, lacks a version number.

Samples

Excessive variation in the wild:

http://www.pcre.org/changelog.txt

Version 8.55 01-July-2014
-------------------------
1.  New foo and bar

http://www.7-zip.org/history.txt

9.51 alpha     2014-07-01
-------------------------
- Now can do foo 
- "Add to bar" dialog

https://www.httrack.com/history.txt

3.45-67
+ Fixed: buggy foo (author)
+ New: bar compiling (author)

https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/blob/master/RELEASES.txt

Version 1.2.3 (July 2014)
-------------------------
* Foo and bar

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jjangsangy/py-translate/master/HISTORY.rst in RST-format (PEP287 for all of PyPI ?)

0.2.3 (2x14-7-11)
++++++++++++++++
- General Foo
- Bar Improvements

http://www.zlib.net/ChangeLog.txt

Changes in 1.2.3 (01 July 2014)
- Update cfoo [Dev]
- Do not bar

http://sqliteadmin.orbmu2k.de/changelog.txt

Version 0.4.3.2 Public Beta
===========================
# Bugfix: foo
+ Added "bar" (thx developer)

http://upx.sourceforge.net/upx-news.txt

Changes in 1.02 (01 Jul 2014):
* New option --foo.
* Allow for bar signing.

https://github.com/apache/cassandra/blob/trunk/NEWS.txt

2.1
===
New features
------------
  - Default to foo.
  - Very user-understandable text actually.

https://twistedmatrix.com/trac/browser/trunk/twisted/topfiles/NEWS which actually follow a predefined formatting scheme https://twistedmatrix.com/trac/wiki/ReviewProcess#Newsfiles

Twisted Core 13.0.0 (2013-03-19)
================================
Features
--------
 - The foo was twisted.
 - And the bar was barred.

So looks like we might have to allow any random prefix text before version number and release datetime spec.

Five is right out

While these are interesting variations, they're also completely non-standard or in any way reasonably parseable:

http://www.freertos.org/History.txt

Changes between V5.0.0 and V5.0.1 released 1st July 2014

           + Minor fixes to the foo.
             The 'bar bits' funct

http://users.jyu.fi/~vesal/kurssit/bin/ct/History.txt

v0.55.5a   + Updated foo.
           ! Denied bar.