Title: CUPS no longer directly depends on its filters
Author: Eli Schwartz <eschwartz93@gmail.com>
Posted: 2023-11-20
Revision: 1
News-Item-Format: 2.0
Display-If-Installed: >=net-print/cups-2.4.7-r2

Reasons
=======

Historically, net-print/cups has both depended on and been a dependency of
net-print/cups-filters. The latter is required for usability of a CUPS
printing setup, but also must build against the former's libraries. This
results in an ugly dependency cycle, and forcing the entire CUPS printing
setup wherever USE=cups is enabled on a framework.

Current upstream work on CUPS has focused on modularizing the codebase. There
are now several packages, and there will be more in the future. Installing
net-print/cups-filters is no longer sufficient to ensure all components are
installed.

In the future, when CUPS v3 is released, filters will be exclusive to legacy
printers, and largely replaced with IPP Everywhere.[1]

A more future-proof way to install a CUPS production printing setup is needed.

User Action Required
=======

cups-filters is required for current versions of CUPS. To prevent depcleaning
if you are a CUPS user (and it was not installed just as a dependency for
something else):

    emerge net-print/cups-meta

If cups-browsed support is desired, add the following package.use:

    net-print/cups-meta browsed


[1] https://openprinting.github.io/current/#the-new-architecture-for-printing-and-scanning