Yes! "Developers should be highly encouraged to write impeccably descriptive commit messages (with the diff in hand: never write a commit message without the diff in hand) for the sake of those who may pick through the logs in the future. It's ok to even be a little wordier than you might be in an inline comment..."

Really nice article on how to write commit messages. "Reveal your intentions, don’t describe what the code does. Tell why it does it."

How you should format commit messages when using git, but just as good for an version control system.

Linux source document on how to submit and format patches.

Andrew Morton on patch format

Linus Torvalds on patch subject formatting