Per HIVE-1882, I'm about to commit the svn remove for CHANGES.txt. So after that, you'll no longer be editing it as part of your commits. Instead, we'll be producing the changelog directly from JIRA.
As a consequence, it becomes even more important that you update JIRA with the correct Fix information when marking an issue resolved. We're about to branch for 0.7, so if you backport patches, you'll be marking fix version 0.7, otherwise (trunk only) you'll be marking 0.8. Carl will send out a reminder once the branch is cut and JIRA has 0.8 defined. (BTW, we suggested making the Fix Version mandatory for JIRA resolution Fixed, but got shot down by INFRA.) JVS