Questions about submitting a patch

Hi everyone

This is my first time submitting a patch for OSS, so bear with me while 
I ask a few questions (couldn't find anything on the site).

First Question: Is Valknut still being actively maintained? I've seen 
some activity here on the mailing list via the archives, and it looks 
like that UTF8 issue got resolved in CVS, but just checking :)

Second Question: How should I note my code changes? Looking at code in 
the Linux kernel, people there will say who submitted the change, their 
e-mail, when they made the change and what the change does in comments. 
Should I go just as far?

Third Question:  I noted the generic C++ documentation (the stuff in the 
/** */ style comments) was missing in most cases in the source. The 
changes I've made have this documentation for the methods, should I keep 
this documentation when I submit a patch?

Fourth Question: i18n. I'm not really familiar with this. I noticed 
there's a lot of language translations for Valknut. My total changes to 
the UI involve a whopping three words, without much of a grammatical 
construct at all. I can go to online dictionaries and grab "close 
enough" translations. Should I grab translations and update the 
translation files?

Fifth Question:  How should I make and submit my patches? I haven't 
worked that in depth with CVS or patch/diff before. Could somebody 
spoon-feed me a way to generate appropriate patch files for the changes 
I've made to the Valknut module? Also, when I've genereated these 
*.patch files, how should I submit them? Can I archive them in a 
*.tar.gz and send them to this mailing list?

Sorry to be a bother, but this is my first go of contributing to OSS :)

Woogie