Might not be as direct as you'd like, but all well managed¹ GNU projects ship a NEWS file in their tarball. In this case you can also read it from savannah² without fetching the tarball.

¹ https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/standards.html#NEWS-File

² https://svn.savannah.gnu.org/viewvc/ddd/trunk/doc/NEWS?view=...