Is there any chance of a way forward on this? It seems that the drivedb.h updates in the 'smartmontools' package aren't just slow, but non-existent - the version that ships with Debian 9.7 dates from a year *before* the release of Debian 9.0
If there is no script to perform an update in the package, and the version available with Debian is ancient, then you end up in a worse situation than what you are trying to avoid - users (like me just now) end up downloading unsigned and unchecked versions of drivedb.h from the Internet by hand, and manually applying them to their systems - I think that is much likely to end up with system breakages than having at least some directions to a (semi-secure) script that will do it correctly. It also seems that almost 3 years after the problem was first mentioned online(in a Ubuntu bug report comment), the man page for "update-smart-drivedb" is still in Debian, despite the script having been removed. I would personally suggest that rather than removing the manual page completely, it should be replaced with a page describing that the script has been removed from Debian, and what users should do instead.
