The OpenPrinting project presented the release of the CUPS 2.4.0 (Common Unix Printing System) printing system, formed without the participation of Apple, which since 2007 has completely controlled the development of the project, absorbing Easy Software Products, which created CUPS. Due to Apple's loss of interest in maintaining the printing system and the general importance of CUPS to the Linux ecosystem, a fork was founded by enthusiasts from the OpenPrinting community in which work on the project was continued without changing the name. Michael R Sweet, the original author of CUPS, who left Apple two years ago, joined the work on the fork. The project code continues to be distributed under the Apache-2.0 license, but the fork's repository is positioned as the primary repository, not Apple's.
The developers of OpenPrinting announced that they would continue development independently of Apple and recommended considering their offshoot as the main project after Apple confirmed its lack of interest in further development of CUPS functionality and intention to limit itself to maintaining the CUPS codebase for macOS, including porting fixes from the fork from OpenPrinting. Since the beginning of 2020, the Apple-maintained CUPS repositories have been in deep stagnation, but recently Michael Sweet has begun porting accumulated changes to it, while simultaneously participating in the development of CUPS in the OpenPrinting repository.
Changes added to CUPS 2.4.0 include compatibility with AirPrint and Mopria clients, adding support for OAuth 2.0/OpenID authentication, adding pkg-config support, improving TLS and X.509 support, implementing "job-sheets-col" and " media-col", support for JSON format output in ipptool, transferring the USB backend to work with root rights, adding a dark theme to the web interface.
It also includes two years of accumulated bug fixes and patches delivered in the Ubuntu package, including the addition of features needed to distribute the CUPS, cups-filters, Ghostscript, and Poppler-based printing stack in a self-contained Snap package (Ubuntu plans switch to this snap instead of regular packages). Deprecated cups-config and Kerberos authentication. The previously deprecated FontPath, ListenBackLog, LPDConfigFile, KeepAliveTimeout, RIPCache, and SMBConfigFile settings have been deprecated in the cupsd.conf and cups-files.conf files.
Of the plans for the release of CUPS 3.0, the intention is to stop supporting the PPD printer description format and switch to a modular printing system architecture completely free of PPD and based on the use of the PAPPL framework for developing print applications (CUPS Printer Applications) based on the IPP Everywhere protocol. It is planned to move such components as commands (lp, lpr, lpstat, cancel), libraries (libcups), local print server (responsible for processing local print output requests) and shared print server (responsible for network printing) into separate modules.
Recall that the OpenPrinting organization was created in 2006 as a result of the merger of the Linuxprinting.org project and the OpenPrinting working group from the Free Software Group, which developed the architecture of the printing system for Linux (Michael Sweet, the author of CUPS, was one of the leaders of this group). A year later, the project was taken over by the Linux Foundation. In 2012, the OpenPrinting project, in agreement with Apple, took over the maintenance of the cups-filters package with the components necessary for CUPS to work on systems other than macOS, since starting with the release of CUPS 1.6, Apple stopped supporting some print filters and backends, used in Linux, but not of interest to macOS, and also deprecated drivers in the PPD format. During his time at Apple, the vast majority of changes to the CUPS codebase were made personally by Michael Sweet.
Source: opennet.ru