Are you referencing the right license/clause? I don't actually see how GPLv2's clause 2. b would require this actually.
> Nobody does that anymore. We have git, and before that we had SVN and CVS and so on.
Yep, I will agree with you that pretty much nobody actually does this, and it does not seem like it is an obstacle so far, e.g. I have not seen legal contention over this, mostly just discussion.
And honestly, writing a mini-changelog definitely seems like overkill with version control, and perhaps in most cases version control metadata is a perfectly acceptable substitute. However, since the file(s) might be distributed outside of version control where the version control data might not be present (e.g. like a release tarball) having at least the copyright information in each file seems useful. Whether it satisfies the "prominent notice that the file is changed" requirement is actually not 100% certain, but I can't imagine it puts you in a worse position to do so.
