The OpenPrinting project has introduced the release of the CUPS 2.4.0 (Common Unix Printing System) printing system, developed independently from Apple, which had completely controlled the project's development since 2007 after acquiring Easy Software Products, the creator of CUPS. Due to Apple’s waning interest in maintaining the printing system and the overall importance of CUPS for the Linux ecosystem, enthusiasts from the OpenPrinting community initiated a fork, continuing the project's work without changing its name. Michael R Sweet, the original author of CUPS who left Apple two years ago, has joined the fork's development. The project's code continues to be supplied under the Apache-2.0 license, but the fork's repository is primarily positioned over Apple’s.
The OpenPrinting developers have stated their commitment to continue development independently from Apple and have recommended considering their branch as the main project after Apple confirmed its lack of interest in further developing CUPS's functionality and its intention to limit itself to maintaining the CUPS codebase for macOS, including transferring fixes from the OpenPrinting fork. Since early 2020, Apple's maintained CUPS repository has been in deep stagnation, but recently, Michael Sweet has begun to transfer accumulated changes to it while also participating in the development of CUPS within the OpenPrinting repository.
Among the changes added in CUPS 2.4.0, compatibility with AirPrint and Mopria clients is noted, along with the addition of OAuth 2.0/OpenID authentication support, pkg-config support, enhanced support for TLS and X.509, implementation of the 'job-sheets-col' and 'media-col' attributes, support for JSON output in ipptool, transition of the USB backend to work with root privileges, and the addition of a dark theme in the web interface.
The package also includes bug fixes and patches accumulated over two years, delivered within Ubuntu, including the necessary functionalities for distributing the printing stack based on CUPS, cups-filters, Ghostscript, and Poppler in a self-contained Snap package (Ubuntu plans to transition to this snap instead of traditional packages). The cups-config and Kerberos authentication have been deprecated. Support for the FontPath, ListenBackLog, LPDConfigFile, KeepAliveTimeout, RIPCache, and SMBConfigFile settings, previously deemed deprecated, has been discontinued in the cupsd.conf and cups-files.conf files.
The release plans for CUPS 3.0 indicate an intention to discontinue support for the PPD printer description format and move towards a modular printing system architecture, completely free of PPD, based on the PAPPL framework for developing print output applications (CUPS Printer Applications) utilizing the IPP Everywhere protocol. Components such as commands (lp, lpr, lpstat, cancel) and libraries (libcups) are expected to be encapsulated into separate modules. server local printing (responsible for handling local print requests) and a shared print server (responsible for network printing).
It is worth noting that the OpenPrinting organization was established in 2006 as a result of the merger of the Linuxprinting.org project and the OpenPrinting working group from the Free Software Group, which focused on developing printing system architecture for Linux (Michael Sweet, the author of CUPS, was one of the leaders of this group). A year later, the project came under the wing of the Linux Foundation. In 2012, the OpenPrinting project took over the maintenance of the cups-filters package with components necessary for CUPS to function in systems other than macOS, as starting with the CUPS 1.6 release, Apple ceased support for certain print filters and backends used in Linux, which were not of interest for macOS, and also deprecated the PPD driver format. During his time at Apple, Michael Sweet personally made the vast majority of changes to the CUPS codebase.
Source: opennet.ru
