Append `/releases.atom` to any GitHub repository, and you'll get an RSS feed.
Example: https://github.com/gradle/gradle/releases.atom
You can add that to your email client, such as Thunderbird. You get the releases and the release notes. I use that for our dependencies and I read the release notes. I also pull the repos and read many commit logs and diffs to predict the direction of these dependencies: if I see a lot of "movement" and "activity" in a category, I can fairly accurately predict that there will be more and I can shape our engineering effort that way.
Example in Thunderbird on Ubuntu:
- Click on the menu
- Click New
- Click "Feed account"
- Enter a name "My project's dependencies"
- Click "Next"
- Click "Finish"
You will have one "My project's dependencies" element appear on the left sidebar in Thunderbird. Click on that, then:
- Click "Manage feed subscriptions", from the right pane.
- Enter: https://github.com/gradle/gradle/releases.atom in the "Feed URL" field on the window that appears
- Click "Add"
- Click "Close".
You will see "Release notes from gradle" appear on the left sidebar, as a child element of "My project's dependencies" 'feed account'.