The plan is to release an updated revision incorporating the QA fixes from bug #332591 (huge thanks to Tomáš Chvátal (scarabeus) for doing the actual work here!) Apart from that there's no real showstopper blocking a stabilization of CUPS 1.4. The printing guide could need an update though, I've already started working on it but my time is limited. Regarding stabilization we can't respect printer drivers which are not in the official tree since the few ones which are in are already hard to maintain with our low manpower, see foo2zjs for example (hplip is in a great shape thanks to the massive work of Daniel Pielmeier (billie) and gutenprint should be fine, too).
As a general rule for upgrading to cups 1.4 when something regarding local usb printers doesn't work: 1. disable kernel usblp: CONFIG_USB_PRINTER=n 2. delete /etc/cups 3. (re-)install cups 1.4 with USE="usb" 4. configure printer(s) from scratch via the cups webinterface 5. if your printer is a multifunction device, be sure you got the udev rules setting the device permissions in shape so cups can access the device If for whatever reason (broken/old printer drivers) that doesn't work out there's still the way to install CUPS 1.4 with USE="-usb" to get the old CUPS 1.3 behaviour back. The printing team is suffering low manpower. We also have a bunch of open bugs which are probably invalid and caused by not following the "upgrade path", broken drivers, or plain misconfiguration, but you can't close them without investigation to not upset our users. Not responding is quite as bad, but as I said above, this is due to lack of time. Regards Timo Gurr (tgurr)
