After the CUPS lead developer left Apple and OpenPrinting taking up CUPS developer after Apple ceased development , CUPS 2.4 eventually materialized. CUPS 2.4 released in 2021 as the culmination of that work to restore the open-source development around this print server while today brings CUPS 2.4.12 for ending out the series and looking toward a future with CUPS 2.5.

This morning's brief CUPS 2.4.12 release announcement reads:

"The last planned release of CUPS 2.4.x series (the next will be 2.5.x series) contains several enhancements among set of bug fixes, such following cryptographic policies when using GnuTLS crypto provider and possibility to opt-out from this behavior, logging job debugging history if print queue backends fails, or raising alerts for certificate issues in IPPS backend."

Succeeding CUPS 2.4/2.4.12 will be the CUPS 2.5 series.

The current Wiki notes plans for getting out a CUPS 2.5 beta in April, a release candidate in May, and hopefully the CUPS 2.5.0 stable release in June. CUPS 2.5 is adding OAuth support to the CUPSD daemon, a default OAuth callback for desktop apps, TLS/X.509 improvements, and other improvements.