To introduce myself, I'm Robert Krawitz <rlk@alum.mit.edu>, the project lead for Gimp-Print. There seem to be a lot of questions about 4.2 and 4.3, and I'd like to clear things up.

Due to our history as a free software/open source project, we adopted a release numbering system whereby the minor release number (2 in the case of 4.2 or 3 in the case of 4.3) indicates whether the release is stable or development. The convention is that an even numbered minor version is a stable release, and an odd numbered minor version is development (unstable, and possibly unusable). So all releases numbered "4.2" (e. g. 4.2.5) are considered stable, and all releases numbered "4.3" (such as 4.3.18) are unstable development releases that may have nifty new features but which may not work. When we stabilize 4.3, it will become either 4.4 or 5.0 (we haven't decided yet).

We periodically issue prereleases on the 4.2 line, such as the recently released 4.2.6-pre2. This is the second prerelease (beta) of 4.2.6. This release is more stable than a 4.3 release, but less stable than a release such as 4.2.5. For example, we accidentally introduced a bug into 4.2.6-pre1 whereby each page of a multi-page job was printed progressively worse. Needless to say, that was quite embarrassing :-( However, the full-fledged 4.2 releases have proven to be extremely stable indeed; we haven't (to date) had a regression or other showstopper be found after release. There are bugs, of course, but generally they can be worked around.

We know that right now there's a problem with the 4.3 line on OS X. It's possible to print with 4.3.18, but only by dragging and dropping PDF or PS files onto the Print Center (or printing from the command line). Printing from applications doesn't work, and we don't know why yet. Right now this is the only issue preventing us from going into alpha. I'm not willing to declare alpha-ready until the software is usable on OS X, because OS X is a very large percentage of our user base, and most Linux/UNIX users who download source can work just fine with development releases if they care to (and this problem doesn't show up there).

Judging by the comments here, we can be more clear about what the releases mean. As a developer, I understand what a "development" release is, but most people in the OS X world apparently don't. That doesn't mean that they're ignorant or wrong, it just means that we don't speak the language too well. Perhaps if we call these release pre-alpha rather than development people would understand better what we mean?

We hope to build a 4.3.21 package soon; this has some great quality improvements (which are already superseded, of course :-) ) and may resolve the problem of printing from applications. I'd suggest people be willing to give it a try, but also be willing to back right out to 4.2.5 or 4.2.6-pre2 if it doesn't work.

Hope this answers some questions.