Issues with 1.4 versions and quality of releases

[Petrus Rossouw]

Hi

This is a question and general comment about version 1.4.  I don't want to be overly negative or be unappreciative of all the work that went into version 1.4, but so far, the 1.4 version has been very disappointing for me.

Question:  Can we please get patches for version 1.4.4 (the current released version) for all the "known" bugs, which were pushed and tested against version 1.5?
There are some bugs which were found in version 1.4.2, but Mike said they are fixed in version 1.5, and no fix was provided for the current or past versions.
E.g. STR #3470

Reason is that I would like to be able to upgrade to a stable version of 1.4, where most bugs are ironed out, since 1.5 is not released yet.
In general I think the CUPS developers should at least support 1 major version from a stability perspective, instead of jumping from version to version and continue to introduce more and more bugs.  At least that is the impression I am getting.

Adding more features and fixing bugs are great to do, but it is utterly useless to us (the users) if we can't use a released version because of bugs, and no patches for the released version are supplied.  In that case it would be better to have fewer release versions, and better quality software.

Version 1.4.2 in my view is more stable from a web interface perspective than version 1.4.3 and 1.4.4, to such an extent that the web interface is unusable on the latest 2 releases.
I can live with version 1.4.2, but I need 1 thing fixed, the other things I can live with:
Can you please give me a patch for version 1.4.2, which will fix the "show completed jobs" and "show all jobs" for a specific printer, aka the fix for the above STR?

Other things I can live with, but should be fixed in my mind for the current released versions are:
* The CUPS daemon for the maxjobs setting is supposed to clean out both c* and d* files aka the control and the print job files.  Instead it is only cleaning out the control files and leaving the job files in place, causing /var/spool/cups to grow unexpectedly.  (we will use a cron job to clean this out in the meantime)
* There seems to be also some changes to how lpstat behaves, e.g. lpstat -p printername, is supposed to list me the printer's status and any jobs still in the queue.  Instead it is only showing the status.
* Modifying the printer via the new web interface does not allow changing the device path, whereas the old 1.3 versions did

I would recommend you look at your 1.4.3 and 1.4.4 version's web interface and fix the following bugs:
*  Listing printers or jobs, have some corruption (special characters or other printable characters) on the pages which should not be there, or it is displaying garbage instead of the correct info.  This is for the english version.
* Clicking on the "show all jobs" or "show completed jobs" for a particular printer is completely broken going to an invalid page.
For 1.4.2, it shows the jobs for all printers, not just for the particular printer.
* Simple static pages like the help files have some corruption like when you click on the "Man Pages" link

These are just a few things I have found with the latest versions, and it seems that others have found similar and more bugs with the 1.4 version.
Version 1.5 shows that only 4 bugs has been fixed, so what happened to all the other bugs which were reported for the earlier version and supposedly fixed in 1.5?  I would hope the idea is to fix all known bugs before 1.5 is released!

I think CUPS is a great piece of software.  So let's please keep it that way.