The bug is that an error would be raised while attempting to convert a
template from one encoding to another.

Please see http://redmine.ruby-lang.org/issues/5564 for more details.

The workaround is to load all conversions into memory ahead of time,
and will only happen if the ruby version is *exactly* 1.9.3p0. The
hope is obviously that the underlying problem will be resolved in
the next patchlevel release of 1.9.3.

Reasons:

 * Markdown reads well as plain text, but can also be formatted.
 * It will make it easier for people to read on the web as Github
   formats the Markdown nicely.
 * It will encourage a level of consistency when people are writing
   CHANGELOG entries.

The script used to perform the conversion is at
https://gist.github.com/1339263