cups 1.4.x is no longer being maintained from the upstream maintainers. cups 1.5.x should be stabilized asap.
it's not even out of package.mask yet, so stabilization is quite a ways off
I'll blog about it and ask for testers. Seems like I'm the only Gentoo dev who cares, but I'm not really printing much...
It's in ~arch now. Needs at least another month. It makes no sense to keep this bug open for the moment.