Nginx

Nginx ships a single plain-text CHANGES file that runs back to 2004, covering every release with terse per-entry categories: Bugfix, Change, Feature. The format is spare enough that the entire two-decade history fits in one file, and dense enough that a careful read before upgrading surfaces edge cases the release headline omits.

The file functions as nginx’s known-issues surface because the project does not maintain a separate one. Bugfix entries carry precise language about failure conditions, naming specific modules, request patterns, and worker-process states, which makes them searchable when something breaks in production. The gap is the absence of severity metadata and any indication of which prior releases carried the defect; the file records fixes, not the full window of exposure.