Smartmontools Release Policy

A few words about smartmontools releases:

Sourcecode

We try to provide source code releases X.Y at least two times a year. Please note that odd-numbered releases will no longer be considered "experimental" or "unstable".

Release candidate tarballs may be provided prior to the final release. In this case only bugfix or trivial commits are allowed on the SVN trunk until the final release.

For each release a SVN tag named RELEASE_X_Y is created (see also do_release script​).

After a release X.Y the package version number is incremented to X.Y+1 on SVN trunk.

If important bugs are reported after X.Y is release, we try to provide bugfix releases X.Y.1, X.Y.2, ... as soon as possible. These are build from a SVN branch named RELEASE_X_Y_BRANCH​ created from tag RELEASE_X_Y. Such a branch is maintained at least until the next major release.

Release files should be uploaded to the ​SourceForge and ​Github.

Binaries

Precompiled packages are only provided for Windows and MacOS. For other platforms see Download info.

Drive Database

The drive database file drivedb.h​ is maintained on trunk. If new features added to drivedb.h are incompatible with the last major release X.Y, a compatible version is provided on a branch named RELEASE_X_Y_DRIVEDB​. Compatible changes from trunk are frequently merged to this branch. The update-smart-drivedb​ script checks this branch first.