Samba Release Planning

The regular Samba release cycle intends a new release series every nine month. Each release series then enters into maintenance mode when the next major release version comes out. Maintenance mode means that only severe bugs and security issues will be addressed. For your convenience, the next to last series will be turned into a security fixes only mode.

That means, a series is

• nine months fully supported,
• another nine months in the maintenance mode,
• nine months in the security fixes only mode.

In total, each series is maintained for a period of approximately 27 months.

Example:

If 4.0 is the current release series, then 3.6 would be in maintenance mode, 3.5 would be in the security fixes only mode, and finally the support of 3.4 would be stopped with the release of 4.0.0.

Each series can have any number of desired minor release. These will be released usually every 6 weeks.

series	status	schedule	started	maintenance	security	discontinued
4.1	new upcoming release series	4.1
4.0	current series	4.0	2012-12-11
3.6	maintenance mode	3.6	2011-08-09
3.5	security fixes only	3.5	2010-03-01		~2012-12-17
3.4	discontinued	3.4	2009-07-03		~2011-08-23	2012-12-11
3.3	discontinued	3.3	2009-01-27		2010-03-01	2011-08-09
3.2	discontinued	3.2	2008-07-02		2009-08-11	2010-03-01
3.0	discontinued	3.0				2009-08-05

For details on the release branches, please see Branch Policy.