Tille Kampeter (Till Kamppeter), project leader OpenPrinting , announced that due to the lack of Apple’s interest in maintaining the CUPS printing system Based last year Fork Cups can be viewed as the basis of the project (Upstream) for the transfer of patches and inclusion in distributions. Michael Redeet is involved in the development of Fork (Michael R Sweet), the initial author of CUPS, a year and a half ago, fired from Apple.
Since the beginning of 2020, in the supported company Apple CUPS repository Not a single change and the project is in deep stagnation. Taking into account the importance of CUPS for the Linux ecosystem team OpenPrinting decided to take the support of CUPS code into their own hands and founded last fall fork. After creating Fork, half a year passed, and Apple did not resume work on Cups.
In response to Michael’s request, Apple confirmed Lack of interest to the further development of CUPS functionality and intends to limit themselves to accompany the code base for MacOS, including transferring corrections from the forka from OpenPrinting. The OpenPrinting developers declared the continuation of the development regardless of Apple and recommended to consider them the branch as the main project. Future versions of the CUPS forka will go out with the preservation of the project name and without previously used subfix “OPX”.
From already added changes, the integration of patches accumulated in the Ubuntu package, as well as adding the capabilities required for distribution stack Prints based on Cups, Cups-Filters, Ghostscript and Poppler in a self-sufficient package in the Snap (Ubuntu plans to go to this SNAP instead of ordinary packages). Another front of work is the correction of errors, which the last 15 months have been reported in the Apple repository.
Changes are planned to be included in the release of CUPS 2.4, in which also It is expected AIRPRINT / MOPRIA compatibility appearance, adding OAuth 2.0 / OpenID authentication support, add support for PKG-CONFIG, improved support for TLS and X.509, support for the attributes “Job-Sheets-COL” and “Media-Col”, Announcement of outdated Cups-Config and authentication through Kerberos.
In the future, in the CUPS 3.0 release, it is decided to stop supporting the PPD printer description format and go to the modular printing system architecture, fully accurate from PPD and based on the use of PAPPL framework to develop print applications ( Cups Printer Applications ) based on IPP EVERYWhere protocol.
