Keeping up with standards, new releases and deprecations

I want to know how programmers keep up with changes in a package or library. I usually go over the release notes. How to keep up with the standards and maintain good coding practices?

Thanks

Edit

By "maintaining good coding practices" I mean is how to keep code efficient and optimized based on changes in the standard/release? For e.g: remove deprecated code, use new features.

I am just wondering what is the right way to go about it? If some feature is deprecated from on开发者_开发问答e version to next do people go and change it in their codebase asap? Thanks Stack Overflow, I learn a lot here :)

I typically look over release notes.

If you need to track the versions and do a full tracability analysis on them from package to vendor, I would research tracability software.

Spreadsheets don't cut it. :)