CUPS 2.4 Coming Next Month, CUPS 2.5 + CUPS 3.0 Already In Planning

An Open Printing micro-conference took place today during the Linux Plumbers Conference 2021 week. While it's hard to get excited about printers in 2021, it is exciting the renewed effort around CUPS with it now being back to effectively led by the community and CUPS founder Michael Sweet who left Apple. CUPS 2.4 is coming as the first feature release in quite a while and then CUPS 2.5 followed by CUPS 3.0 are already being talked about with features being discussed.

While Apple led CUPS development while employing Michael Sweet for about a decade, Sweet left Apple at the end of 2019 and Apple's public CUPS development effectively ended. As has been since confirmed, Apple now is basically interested in just maintaining CUPS 2.3 and not really developing it further.

Earlier this year was the news that the OpenPrinting community will now be developing upstream CUPS moving forward. OpenPrinting now controls the de facto CUPS project moving forward with Michael Sweet being involved in the effort. Apple has even contracted Sweet to back-port some fixes back to their Apple CUPS 2.3 build.

Michael Sweet talked at today's Open Printing micro-conference about the upcoming CUPS 2.4 release and then the follow-on releases of CUPS 2.5 and the big CUPS 3.0. With CUPS 2.4 so far there have been more than 90 issues resolved, AirPrint and Mopria printer sharing support introduced, OAuth authentication support, container support for Snapcraft, pkg-config support, and deprecating Kerberos and cups-config.

Michael Sweet is looking at issuing the first CUPS 2.4 beta in the coming days and then issue a release candidate next month and potentially CUPS 2.4.0 before the end of October.

CUPS 2.5 is looking at OAuth support for CUPSD, TLS/X.509 improvements, centralized CUPS localization, Docker/AppImage support, and more. CUPS 2.5 will likely see its stable release in November of next year.

Meanwhile CUPS 3.0 is being talked about for 2023 as the successor to CUPS 2.5. CUPS 3.0 is expected to re-architect CUPS to improve its design and much more modern. CUPS 3.0 could potentially split the project into separate CUPS library, command-line tools, local server, and sharing server sub-projects.

Learn more about the CUPS 2.4/2.5/3.0 plans via Sweet's presentation. The entire Open Printing micro-conference livestream recording is embedded below.