We periodically deprecate functionality that either is no longer necessary or prevents us from improving CUPS. Deprecated functionality continues to work, often for years, as we help users and developers migrate away from it.

When we deprecate something:

• We announce the deprecation as far in advance as possible,
• We display a warning that the functionality is going away in a future release of CUPS, and
• We help developers and users migrate to any replacement functionality, if applicable.

Deprecation is a necessary step prior to removal from CUPS. Deprecated items are still functional until removed.

After a transition period, deprecated items are removed from CUPS. Deprecated CUPS APIs are never fully removed from shared libraries - non-functional stubs remain - in order to preserve binary compatibility.

We’ve had some hard exceptions over the years:

• Security issues forced us to do a hard transition of some cupsd.conf directives to cups-files.conf,
• Security issues forced us to drop interface script support, and
• Performance and architectural issues forced us to drop CUPS browsing before Avahi was fully supported/deployed.

If you have any questions about our project’s deprecation process, please feel free to contact us on the “cups-devel” list.