1 $Id: TODO,v 1.120 2014/07/03 10:19:47 fabiankeil Exp $
3 Some Privoxy-related tasks, sorted by the time they
4 have been added, not by priority.
6 The latest version should be available at:
7 http://ijbswa.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/ijbswa/current/TODO
9 There's work in progress to fund development on these items using
10 donations. If you want to donate, please have a look at:
11 http://www.spi-inc.org/donations/
13 If you have any questions regarding donations please either mail to
14 the public user mailing list (ijbswa-users@lists.sourceforge.net) or
15 to Privoxy's SPI liason Fabian (fk@fabiankeil.de).
17 1) Add more regression tests. Filters should be tested automatically
18 (variables too). Could probably reuse large parts of Privoxy-Filter-Test.
19 Note that there is currently work in progress to leverage curl's
20 test suite, patches have been submitted upstream:
21 http://curl.haxx.se/mail/lib-2014-06/0070.html
23 3) Fix some more XXX: comments.
25 6) Remove actions that aren't needed anymore:
27 content-type-overwrite should probably stay as it's also
28 used by some of the CGI pages (XXX: name them).
30 crunch-client-header and crunch-server-header should probably
31 go, their only advantage is that their search strings can be
32 controlled through the CGI pages, other than that they only
35 crunch-if-none-match can be replaced with a header filter.
37 prevent-compression has a misleading name and could
38 be replaced with a header filter.
40 7) force-text-mode has a stupid name and should probably
41 be renamed to force-filter-mode.
43 8) handle-as-empty-document and handle-as-image should
44 be merged to something like handle-as{something} to
45 prevent them from being activated at the same time.
47 10) There's a bug in the CGI editor that turns the
48 first section's "Insert new section below" into
49 a "Insert new section above" button.
51 11) CGI templates should use semantically-correct HTML
54 12) Support pipelining for outgoing connections.
56 14) Allow to filter POST parameters.
58 15) If trusted CGI pages are requested without trusted referrer,
59 set the status code to 403 instead of 200.
61 16) Filter SSL encrypted content as well.
63 At the beginning we could use a unencrypted connection between
64 client and Privoxy, and use an encrypted connection between
65 Privoxy and the server.
67 This should be good enough for most of the content the
68 user would want to filter.
70 19) enable-forward-fallback. Syntax? Suggested by K.R.
72 21) User Manual delivery doesn't accept multiple slashes. Should it?
74 22) Verify action files properly (Including arguments) and
75 act accordingly (should probably intercept all requests
76 with a "Invalid option foo detected" CGI page).
78 23) Do the same in case of syntax errors in the configuration file,
79 instead of just exiting or ignoring the problem.
81 25) Handle multiple filters with the same name better. Reject them?
83 26) Let show-url-info detect clearly invalid URLs.
85 27) Make errno logging less thread-unsafe.
86 Verify that it's really an improvement.
88 28) Don't take default ports in case of invalid forwarding ports.
90 31) If a string action foo is disabled csp->action->string[ACTION_STRING_FOO]
91 doesn't necessarily contain NULL, but may contain the string of an
92 enabled foo action in an overruled section. Is it a bug? Does it matter?
94 32) In case of forwarding failures with socks port == 9050,
95 show extra info about Tor (the whole FAQ entry?).
97 36) Unload unused action files directly, even if they are
98 disabled without replacement.
100 38) In the final results, explicitly list disabled multi actions
101 with their parameters. Not as trivial as it sounds.
103 40) When running in daemon mode, Privoxy's working directory is '/'
104 which means it may not have permissions to dump core when necessary.
105 Figure out a way to solve this. Introduce a cwd config option?
107 41) Change documentation framework to one that works cross-platform.
110 42) Add a DTrace USDT provider. Now that FreeBSD has userland DTrace
111 support there's no longer any reason not to.
113 43) Write a tool to check URL patterns against URLs in the log file.
114 This could be included in Privoxy-Regression-Test.
116 44) Privoxy-Log-Parser: Consider highlighting "Connection" in:
117 23:13:03.506 283b6100 Header: Replaced: 'Connection: Keep-Alive' with 'Connection: close'
119 50) Investigate possible PCRS template speedup when searching
120 macros with strstr() before compiling pcrs commands.
121 Investigated, needs some restructuring but is probably worth it.
123 51) Make user-manual directive more generic to allow serving
124 the FAQ and other stuff, too. Consider changing the port
125 for "same origin policy" issues.
127 53) Find a more reliable hoster. Involves finding out what our
128 requirements are and which SF alternatives fulfil them.
129 It would probably also make sense to look into what other
130 projects did when migrating away from SF.
132 2014-05-13: Work in progress. Hosting wish list at the end
135 Interested donors: 1.
137 54) Move away from CVS to a more modern revision control system.
138 Find out if there are any objection against going with Git.
139 Using Git would also have the advantage that SF now pretends
140 to support it, so we could do it independently from 53).
142 55) Apply for Coverity scans: http://scan.coverity.com/
144 58) Move more template strings from the code into the actual templates.
146 59) Import the German template translation.
148 60) Ask the Russian translators for input on how to make their
151 61) Consider (optionally?) skipping the hostname comparison when
152 checking if a connections that goes to a HTTP proxy can be reused.
153 Do all HTTP proxy support that? Is it worth it?
155 63) Reject clearly too large requests earlier?
157 64) Use proper copyright attribution. "Privoxy Developers"
160 65) Polish Website. Probably involves ditching the Docbook
161 mess in favour of wml. There are already several threads
162 in the mailinglist archives about this. See also #41.
164 66) Stop hard-coding the number of action and filter files.
166 67) Clean up source code directory layout. Depends on 54 so
167 we don't lose the revision history.
169 68) Use standard make syntax so we don't depend on GNU make.
171 69) Update autoconf setup (or move away from it).
173 70) If the server connection is reset but the headers are
174 received, consider passing the mess to the client instead
175 of showing the connect-failed template. Relates to #2698674.
177 74) Let Privoxy-Regression-Test optionally check that action
178 sections which disable actions actually are preceded by
179 sections that enable said actions.
181 75) Create a tool that creates Privoxy action (and filter?) files
182 out of adblock files. Could be implemented as option for
183 url-pattern-translator.pl.
185 76) Cache DNS responses. Note that this has been requested
186 several times by users, but is not a developer priority.
187 If you care about this, feel free to submit patches.
189 77) Allow to configure the IP address used in outgoing connections.
191 78) Allow to optionally use pcre's DFA algorithm.
193 79) Evaluate pcre alternatives.
195 80) Change FEATURE_EXTENDED_HOST_PATTERNS to support both
196 extended and vanilla host patterns at the same time.
198 Note that the requirement is to allow the user to decide
199 if the domain pattern should be interpreted as regex or
200 traditional host pattern and if it's not obvious that the
201 user made any decision, default to the latter.
203 Possible solutions would be:
205 1. An always-use-regex-domain-patterns config option
206 2. An enable-regex-domain-patterns-for-this-action-file option
207 3. An enable-regex-domain-patterns-for-this-action-file-until-the-user-says-otherwise option
208 4. A treat-the-domain-pattern-in-this-line-as-regex(-or-not) option
209 5. Combinations of the options above
211 With 2+4, 3+4 or 2+3+4 being the preferences until
214 82) Detect if the system time goes back in time let the user
215 know if it caused any connections to get closed.
217 84) Flesh out the user-manual delivery to serve pages from
218 other directories, too.
220 85) Once #84 is done, write a script that populates a directory with
221 various common third-party icons (stumbleupon.png, facebook.png ...)
222 and redirect requests for them to Privoxy.
224 86) Add a server-body-tagger action. This is trivial as as all the
225 functionality required to do it already exists.
227 87) Add a client-body-tagger action. This is less trivial as we currently
228 don't buffer client bodies. After 14) is implemented it would be
231 88) Investigate if there's a Perl module that Privoxy-Regression-Test
232 could optionally use to keep connections alive, preferably while
233 requiring less forks at the same time.
235 89) When multiple block actions apply, consider showing all the block
236 reasons on the blocked page that haven't been overruled, not just
239 91) Add an optional limit for internal redirects. It would probably
240 be reasonable to default to a limit of one and showing an error
241 message if the request for the redirect URL would be redirected
244 92) The statistics currently aren't calculated correctly by Privoxy
245 as each thread is only counted as one request which is no longer
246 correct. This should be fixed, or the statistic code removed.
247 Privoxy-Log-Parser's provides more detailed statistics, anyway.
249 93) Add a config directive to let Privoxy explicitly request either
250 IPv4 (or IPv6) addresses, even if the system supports both.
251 Could be useful as a workaround for misconfigured setups where the
252 libc returns IPv6 addresses even if there's no IPv6 connectivity.
254 94) Add a config directive to let Privoxy prefer either IPv4 (or IPv6)
255 addresses, instead of trusting the libc to return them in an order
256 that makes sense. Like #93, this could be useful as a workaround
257 for misconfigured setups.
259 95) Support a non-standard client header in CONNECT requests that
260 contains the URL of the requested resource, which is then treated
261 like the request URL.
263 This way the client could opt-in for path-based blocking of https
264 requests. Given that the headers from the CONNECT request aren't
265 forwarded to the destination server, an unencrypted URL should be
266 acceptable if the client and Privoxy are running on the same system
267 or in a trusted environment.
269 96) Filters should be easier to look up. Currently get_filter() has to
270 go through all filters and skip the filter types the caller isn't
273 98) When showing action section on the CGI pages, properly escape
274 line breaks so they can be copy&pasted into action files without
277 99) Figure out a mechanism through which a user can easily enable
278 site-specific action sections that are too aggressive to be
279 enabled by default. This could be similar to the presettings
280 in default.action, but could also be just another action file
281 that isn't used by default.
283 100) Create a cross-platform Privoxy control program and retire
284 the win32 GUI. Integrate support for Privoxy-Regression-Test,
285 Privoxy-Log-Parser, Privoxy-Filter-Test, uagen and similar tools.
287 102) Add an include directive to split the config file into several parts.
289 103) Potential performance improvement for large action files:
290 when figuring out which actions apply, check the action bit mask
291 before pattern matching and skip section that wouldn't modify the
292 actions already set. To increase the impact the sections would have
293 to be applied in reverse.
295 104) The code to modify global_toggle_state should be factored out into
296 a separate function. Currently we mess with it in three different
297 files, but only in w32log.c the tray icon is explicitly set.
298 The logging is inconsistent as well. For details see #3525694.
300 105) Add support for socks authentication.
302 106) actionlist.h should be embedded in a way that causes less text
305 107) Support more pcrs variables, for example $destination-ip-address
306 and $source-ip-address.
308 108) Allow to use a somewhat random string instead of PRIVOXY-FORCE.
310 109) Let log_error() support the format specifier %S which should
311 work like %s but escape new lines like %N. This would be useful
312 to log the result of header filters which may inject new lines.
314 110) Add a global-buffer-limit directive that roughly limits how
315 much malloc'ed memory Privoxy will use and can potentially
316 be smaller than (buffer-limit * max-client-connections).
318 111) Reject requests if hosts and ports in request line and Host
319 header don't match (before filters have been applied).
321 112) If a header filter is used to inject another header by inserting
322 a \r\n (undocumented feature), detect it and split the headers so
323 following header actions do not treat them as a single string.
324 Alternatively add another header injection mechanism.
326 113) Log statistics upon receiving a certain signal (SIGINFO or SIGUSR1).
328 114) Properly deal with status code 100. The current "Continue hack"
329 can cause problems for gpg when uploading keys through Privoxy.
331 115) Add ICAP (RFC 3507) support. FR #3615158.
333 116) Due to the use of sscanf(), Privoxy currently will fail to properly
334 parse chunks whose size can't be represented with 32 bit. This is
335 unlikely to cause problems in the real world, but should eventually
336 be fixed anyway. See also:
337 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=959100
339 118) There should be "escaped" dynamic variables that are guaranteed
340 not to break filters.
342 119) Evaluate using pcre's jit mode.
344 120) Add an option to limit pcre's recursion limit below the default.
345 On some platforms the recursion limit doesn't prevent pcre from
346 running out of stack space, causing the kernel to kill Privoxy
349 121) Add HTTP/2 support. As a first step, incomming HTTP/1.x requests
350 should be translated to outgoing HTTP/2 requests where possible
351 (and if desired by the user).
353 122) Allow customized log messages.
355 123) Evaluate if the voluntarily-disclose-session-keys option in Firefox
356 (and other browsers) can be leveraged. Probably depends on #16.
358 124) Add support for the "lightweight OS capability and sandbox framework"
359 Capsicum. http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/capsicum/
360 Interested donors: 1.
362 125) Allow clients to HTTPS-encrypt the proxy connection.
363 Interested donors: 1.
365 126) Run the Co-Advisor HTTP compliance tests, evaluate the results,
366 fix the compliance issues that aren't by design and document
368 Note that Privoxy developers qualified for free account upgrades:
369 http://coad.measurement-factory.com/details.html#pricing
371 127) Add "real" CGI support (serve program output instead of forwarding
372 the request). The work is mostly done due to +external-filter{}.
374 128) Add a config directive to control the stack limit.
376 129) Completely implement RFC 7230 4.1 (Chunked Transfer Coding).
377 Currently Privoxy doesn't properly deal with trailers which
378 are rarely used in the real world but should be supported anyway.
380 130) Move header_tagger() out of the parser structs and let it execute
381 taggers one-by-one against all headers so the header order has less
382 influence on the tagging result. As a bonus, dynamic taggers would
383 have to be compiled less often.
385 131) The handle-as-empty-doc-returns-ok directive should be replaced with
386 an action so the behaviour can be enabled on a per-request basis.
387 Interested donors: 1.
389 132) Provide a Tor hidden service to reach the Privoxy website.
390 Interested donors: 1.
392 133) Consider allowing bitcoin donations.
393 Interested donors: 1.
395 134) Track the total number of bytes written to and received from a socket.
397 ##########################################################################
399 Hosting wish list (relevant for #53)
404 - Mailinglists (Mailman with public archives preferred)
405 - Webspace (on a Unix-like OS that works with the webserver targets
407 - Source code repositories (currently CVS, but migrating away
408 from it is TODO #54 anyway and shouldn't be too much trouble)
409 - Commit mails (preferably with unified diffs)
411 (Unsorted) details to look at when evaluating hosters:
413 1. Preferably no third-party ads and trackers.
414 External images, CSS and JavaScript may count as trackers
415 but texts like "supported by company XYZ" may be acceptable.
417 2. JavaScript should be optional or not used at all.
419 3. Services we don't need shouldn't be enabled anyway.
420 (We currently don't use Web forums, wikis, surveys etc.)
422 4. It would be preferable if the hoster didn't have a bad track
423 record as far as user experience, security and privacy are
424 concerned and if the terms of service are "reasonable" and
425 haven't changed too often in the past. Updates in the past
426 should have been improvements and not regressions.
428 5. It would be preferable if most of the server administration
429 is done by a trusted third-party (or at least not a lot of work
432 6. The server(s) should be located in a country with laws we can
433 understand and follow (or at least not unintentionally violate).
435 7. A server location in a country with some kind of due process
436 and strong data protection laws (at least on paper) would be
439 8. Given that Privoxy is a free software project it would be
440 preferable if the hoster would use free software where possible.
442 9. Migrating away from the hoster in the future without losing
443 any important data should be possible without writing web