I was expecting that there would be one more release of Gimp-Print 4.2 that would primarily contain bug fixes and incremental support for new printers. By 2003, many of the printers being released had capabilities beyond what Gimp-Print 4.2 could support. I also expected that we would be ready to release Gimp-Print 4.4 or 5.0 within a year, so there wouldn't be a need for anything more. We released Gimp-Print 4.2.6 in early 2004. However, there were still some problems with that release, and we did one more release (4.2.7) in July 2004. This wound up being the final Gimp-Print 4.2 release.
We were doing new releases of 4.3 for intrepid adventurers every few weeks, with extensive changes continuing, and it was only in December that we finally felt ready to move to 5.0 alpha, which we released in January 2004. Progress was slow; there were still quite a few API changes we felt we needed to make, and there were still serious quality problems with many printers. In addition, new printers were being shipped with additional inks that we couldn't handle very well. We also had to adapt to other changes, such as GIMP 2.0 based on GTK+ 2.0, which was not backward compatible with GTK+/GIMP 1.2. We released Gimp-Print 5.0 beta in June with many improvements, but there were still quite a few things on our release checklist that weren't done.
We were still in beta; progress was slow at this point, but we weren't satisfied with the results. We finally did our first release candidate in September 2005, over a year after we entered beta. We continued to move toward 5.0 release, but there was still a lot of cleanup work that needed to be done: printers needed to be retuned, PPD files needed to be validated, we needed to incorporate feedback from users that we only really started to get from the release candidates. There were a number of serious but subtle bugs with the CUPS and Foomatic interfaces that needed to be fixed in order to have a useful 5.0 public release.
In April 2006 I attended my second printing summit, this one hosted by Lanier, and spent three days working with many key players in the Linux/UNIX printing world. This was very productive; I got a lot of useful feedback on various issues and was able to raise issues important to Gutenprint. We released the third release candidate in May 2006, with a tremendous number of bug fixes and improvements, and this finally felt like a real release candidate. We received extensive feedback from this release, and fixed other problems and made some other changes to improve quality.
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