1 Some Privoxy-related tasks, sorted by the time they
2 have been added, not by priority.
4 The latest version should be available at:
5 https://www.privoxy.org/gitweb/?p=privoxy.git;a=blob_plain;f=TODO;hb=HEAD
7 There's work in progress to fund development on these items using
8 donations. If you want to donate, please have a look at:
9 https://www.privoxy.org/donate
11 1) Add more regression tests. Filters should be tested automatically
12 (variables too). Could probably reuse large parts of Privoxy-Filter-Test.
13 Note that there is currently work in progress to leverage curl's
14 test suite, patches have been submitted upstream:
15 https://curl.se/mail/lib-2014-06/0070.html
17 3) Fix some more XXX: comments.
19 6) Remove actions that aren't needed anymore:
21 content-type-overwrite should probably stay as it's also
22 used by some of the CGI pages (XXX: name them).
24 crunch-client-header and crunch-server-header should probably
25 go, their only advantage is that their search strings can be
26 controlled through the CGI pages, other than that they only
29 crunch-if-none-match can be replaced with a header filter.
31 prevent-compression has a misleading name and could
32 be replaced with a header filter.
34 7) force-text-mode has a stupid name and should probably
35 be renamed to force-filter-mode.
37 8) handle-as-empty-document and handle-as-image should
38 be merged to something like handle-as{something} to
39 prevent them from being activated at the same time.
41 10) There's a bug in the CGI editor that turns the
42 first section's "Insert new section below" into
43 a "Insert new section above" button.
45 11) CGI templates should use semantically-correct HTML
50 12) Support pipelining for outgoing connections.
52 14) Allow to filter POST parameters.
53 Work in progress: https://sourceforge.net/p/ijbswa/patches/145/
55 19) enable-forward-fallback. Syntax? Suggested by K.R.
57 21) User Manual delivery doesn't accept multiple slashes. Should it?
59 22) Verify action files properly (Including arguments) and
60 act accordingly (should probably intercept all requests
61 with a "Invalid option foo detected" CGI page).
63 23) Do the same in case of syntax errors in the configuration file,
64 instead of just exiting or ignoring the problem.
66 25) Handle multiple filters with the same name better. Reject them?
68 26) Let show-url-info detect clearly invalid URLs.
70 27) Make errno logging less thread-unsafe.
71 Verify that it's really an improvement.
73 28) Don't take default ports in case of invalid forwarding ports.
75 31) If a string action foo is disabled csp->action->string[ACTION_STRING_FOO]
76 doesn't necessarily contain NULL, but may contain the string of an
77 enabled foo action in an overruled section. Is it a bug? Does it matter?
79 32) In case of forwarding failures with socks port == 9050,
80 show extra info about Tor (the whole FAQ entry?).
82 36) Unload unused action files directly, even if they are
83 disabled without replacement.
85 38) In the final results, explicitly list disabled multi actions
86 with their parameters. Not as trivial as it sounds.
88 40) When running in daemon mode, Privoxy's working directory is '/'
89 which means it may not have permissions to dump core when necessary.
90 Figure out a way to solve this. Introduce a cwd config option?
92 41) Change documentation framework to one that works cross-platform.
93 Evaluate WML and txt2tags.
95 42) Add a DTrace USDT provider. Now that FreeBSD has userland DTrace
96 support there's no longer any reason not to.
98 43) Write a tool to check URL patterns against URLs in the log file.
99 This could be included in Privoxy-Regression-Test.
101 44) Privoxy-Log-Parser: Consider highlighting "Connection" in:
102 23:13:03.506 283b6100 Header: Replaced: 'Connection: Keep-Alive' with 'Connection: close'
104 50) Investigate possible PCRS template speedup when searching
105 macros with strstr() before compiling pcrs commands.
106 Investigated, needs some restructuring but is probably worth it.
108 51) Make user-manual directive more generic to allow serving the FAQ
109 and files from user-specified directories. Consider changing the
110 port for "same origin policy" issues.
112 53) Find a more reliable hoster. Involves finding out what our
113 requirements are and which SF alternatives fulfil them.
114 It would probably also make sense to look into what other
115 projects did when migrating away from SF.
117 2014-05: Work in progress. Hosting wish list at the end
118 of this file. Looks like most of the other projects
119 that left SF had lower standards and moved to hosters
120 that don't come close to sattisfying the requirements.
121 2016-03: The website has been moved away from SF infrastructure
122 and is also available through https:// now.
123 2016-04: Server rent for a year has been sponsored by ChameleonJohn.
124 2016-04: The SF mailing lists have been deprecated, the new ones
125 are available at: https://lists.privoxy.org/
127 Interested donors: 1.
129 58) Move more template strings from the code into the actual templates.
131 59) Import the German template translation.
133 60) Ask the Russian translators for input on how to make their
136 61) Consider (optionally?) skipping the hostname comparison when
137 checking if a connections that goes to a HTTP proxy can be reused.
138 Do all HTTP proxy support that? Is it worth it?
140 63) Reject clearly too large requests earlier?
142 64) Use proper copyright attribution. "Privoxy Developers"
145 65) Polish Website. Probably involves ditching the Docbook
146 mess. There are already several threads in the mailinglist
147 archives about this. See also #41.
149 66) Stop hard-coding the number of action and filter files.
151 67) Clean up source code directory layout.
153 68) Use standard make syntax so we don't depend on GNU make.
155 69) Update autoconf setup (or move away from it).
156 Unfortunately the autoconf files can't be simply updated
157 due to license issues:
158 https://lists.privoxy.org/pipermail/privoxy-devel/2016-April/000008.html
160 70) If the server connection is reset but the headers are
161 received, consider passing the mess to the client instead
162 of showing the connect-failed template. Relates to #2698674.
164 74) Let Privoxy-Regression-Test optionally check that action
165 sections which disable actions actually are preceded by
166 sections that enable said actions.
168 75) Create a tool that creates Privoxy action (and filter?) files
169 out of adblock files. Could be implemented as option for
170 url-pattern-translator.pl.
172 76) Cache DNS responses. Note that this has been requested
173 several times by users, but is not a developer priority.
174 If you care about this, feel free to submit patches.
176 77) Allow to configure the IP address used in outgoing connections.
178 78) Allow to optionally use pcre's DFA algorithm.
180 79) Evaluate pcre alternatives.
182 82) Detect if the system time goes back in time let the user
183 know if it caused any connections to get closed.
185 85) Once #51 is done, write a script that populates a directory with
186 various common third-party icons (stumbleupon.png, facebook.png ...)
187 and redirect requests for them to Privoxy.
189 86) Add a server-body-tagger action. This is trivial as as all the
190 functionality required to do it already exists.
192 87) Add a client-body-tagger action. This is less trivial as we currently
193 don't buffer client bodies. After 14) is implemented it would be
196 88) Investigate if there's a Perl module that Privoxy-Regression-Test
197 could optionally use to keep connections alive, preferably while
198 requiring less forks at the same time.
200 89) When multiple block actions apply, consider showing all the block
201 reasons on the blocked page that haven't been overruled, not just
204 91) Add an optional limit for internal redirects. It would probably
205 be reasonable to default to a limit of one and showing an error
206 message if the request for the redirect URL would be redirected
209 92) The statistics currently aren't calculated correctly by Privoxy
210 as each thread is only counted as one request which is no longer
211 correct. This should be fixed, or the statistic code removed.
212 Privoxy-Log-Parser's provides more detailed statistics, anyway.
214 93) Add a config directive to let Privoxy explicitly request either
215 IPv4 (or IPv6) addresses, even if the system supports both.
216 Could be useful as a workaround for misconfigured setups where the
217 libc returns IPv6 addresses even if there's no IPv6 connectivity.
219 94) Add a config directive to let Privoxy prefer either IPv4 (or IPv6)
220 addresses, instead of trusting the libc to return them in an order
221 that makes sense. Like #93, this could be useful as a workaround
222 for misconfigured setups.
224 96) Filters should be easier to look up. Currently get_filter() has to
225 go through all filters and skip the filter types the caller isn't
228 98) When showing action sections on the CGI pages, properly escape
229 line breaks so they can be copy&pasted into action files without
232 99) Figure out a mechanism through which a user can easily enable
233 site-specific action sections that are too aggressive to be
234 enabled by default. This could be similar to the presettings
235 in default.action, but could also be just another action file
236 that isn't used by default.
238 100) Create a cross-platform Privoxy control program and retire
239 the win32 GUI. Integrate support for Privoxy-Regression-Test,
240 Privoxy-Log-Parser, Privoxy-Filter-Test, uagen and similar tools.
241 Interested donors: 1.
243 102) Add an include directive to split the config file into several parts.
245 103) Potential performance improvement for large action files:
246 when figuring out which actions apply, check the action bit mask
247 before pattern matching and skip section that wouldn't modify the
248 actions already set. To increase the impact the sections would have
249 to be applied in reverse.
251 104) The code to modify global_toggle_state should be factored out into
252 a separate function. Currently we mess with it in three different
253 files, but only in w32log.c the tray icon is explicitly set.
254 The logging is inconsistent as well. For details see #3525694.
256 106) actionlist.h should be embedded in a way that causes less text
259 107) Support more pcrs variables, for example $destination-ip-address
260 and $source-ip-address.
262 108) Allow to use a somewhat random string instead of PRIVOXY-FORCE.
264 109) Let log_error() support the format specifier %S which should
265 work like %s but escape new lines like %N. This would be useful
266 to log the result of header filters which may inject new lines.
268 110) Add a global-buffer-limit directive that roughly limits how
269 much malloc'ed memory Privoxy will use and can potentially
270 be smaller than (buffer-limit * max-client-connections).
272 111) Reject requests if hosts and ports in request line and Host
273 header don't match (before filters have been applied).
275 112) If a header filter is used to inject another header by inserting
276 a \r\n (undocumented feature), detect it and split the headers so
277 following header actions do not treat them as a single string.
278 Alternatively add another header injection mechanism.
280 113) Log statistics upon receiving a certain signal (SIGINFO or SIGUSR1).
282 114) Properly deal with status code 100. The current "Continue hack"
283 can cause problems for gpg when uploading keys through Privoxy.
285 115) Add ICAP (RFC 3507) support. FR #3615158.
287 116) Due to the use of sscanf(), Privoxy currently will fail to properly
288 parse chunks whose size can't be represented with 32 bit. This is
289 unlikely to cause problems in the real world, but should eventually
290 be fixed anyway. See also:
291 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=959100
293 118) There should be "escaped" dynamic variables that are guaranteed
294 not to break filters.
296 120) Add an option to limit pcre's recursion limit below the default.
297 On some platforms the recursion limit doesn't prevent pcre from
298 running out of stack space, causing the kernel to kill Privoxy
301 121) Add HTTP/2 support. As a first step, incoming HTTP/1.x requests
302 should be translated to outgoing HTTP/2 requests where possible
303 (and if desired by the user).
304 Interested donors: 1.
306 122) Allow customized log messages.
308 124) Add support for the "lightweight OS capability and sandbox framework"
309 Capsicum. http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/capsicum/
310 Interested donors: 1.
312 125) Allow clients to HTTPS-encrypt the proxy connection.
313 Interested donors: 1.
315 126) Run the Co-Advisor HTTP compliance tests, evaluate the results,
316 fix the compliance issues that aren't by design and document
318 Note that Privoxy developers qualify for free account upgrades:
319 http://coad.measurement-factory.com/details.html#pricing
321 127) Add "real" CGI support (serve program output instead of forwarding
322 the request). The work is mostly done due to +external-filter{}.
324 128) Add a config directive to control the stack limit.
326 129) Completely implement RFC 7230 4.1 (Chunked Transfer Coding).
327 Currently Privoxy doesn't properly deal with trailers which
328 are rarely used in the real world but should be supported anyway.
330 130) Move header_tagger() out of the parser structs and let it execute
331 taggers one-by-one against all headers so the header order has less
332 influence on the tagging result. As a bonus, dynamic taggers would
333 have to be compiled less often.
335 131) The handle-as-empty-doc-returns-ok directive should be replaced with
336 an action so the behaviour can be enabled on a per-request basis.
337 Interested donors: 1.
339 133) Consider allowing bitcoin donations.
340 Interested donors: 2.
342 134) Track the total number of bytes written to and received from a socket.
344 135) Add OpenBSM audit support.
346 136) Make builds reproducible.
348 138) Bring back the scripts to provide actions file feedback.
350 Once upon a time (~2003) there were scripts on the webserver
351 to make reporting action file feedback more convenient for the
352 user and the actual reports more useful for the developers.
353 They have been unusable for years and have thus been disabled,
354 but making the reporting mechanism available again would be a
357 140) Toggling Privoxy off currently also disables stuff that
358 probably shouldn't be affected (such as actions like
359 forward-override). Investigate and fix or document.
361 142) Remove or update the "internal" pcre version.
363 143) Add support for OpenBSD's pledge feature once it's stablelized.
364 This should be a lot less work then #124.
366 146) Allow to save the internal client tag state to disk and
367 load it after restarts.
369 147) Improve "Building from Source" section in the user manual.
370 A common problem seems to be that it's not obvious to non-technical
371 users how the listed dependencies can be installed on the commonly
372 used platforms. Adding a couple of examples should also be useful for
373 technical users (like Privoxy developers) who want to install or test
374 Privoxy on platforms they are not familiar with.
376 148) Add a config directive to change the CGI_SITE_2_HOST
377 (default: config.privoxy.org).
379 If Privoxy is used as reverse proxy or intercepting proxy without
380 getting intercepted requests, error pages created from default templates
381 currently can result in client requests to config.privoxy.org on the
382 Internet which may not be desirable.
384 150) Add blacklistd support.
386 151) Let the dok-tidy target work cross-platform without introducing
387 a ton of white-space changes that hide the content changes.
389 152) Fix CSS references in the website documentation.
390 For many pages p_doc.css is specified twice using different paths.
391 Usually at least one works, but not all of them do and the
392 duplicated requests are pointless even if they don't end up with
395 153) Catch SIGINT and use it to close the listen socket, serve
396 remaining connections and shut down. This would allow higher
397 uptime and make testing more convenient.
399 154) Underline links in docs and cgi pages. More precisely,
400 don't mess with the browser defaults for link underlining.
402 155) The sig_handler() shouldn't call log_error().
403 While it isn't known to cause actual problems in normal operation,
404 it's technically incorrect and causes crashes when running in
407 156) Reject socks requests with an explicit error message similar
408 to the one used for ftp. Motivation:
409 https://lists.privoxy.org/pipermail/privoxy-users/2017-March/000195.html
411 158) Use a single thread to wait for new requests on reused client connections.
412 Currently the thread that handles the first request on a connection
413 stays responsible for the client connect until it gets closed.
414 In case of lots of idle connections lots of waiting threads are used.
415 While it's conceivable that this ineffiency is irrelevant from a
416 performance point of view, using a single thread should reduce Privoxy's
417 memory footprint a bit which may be noticeable in case of multi-user setups
418 with hundreds of idle connections.
420 161) Properly support requests with chunked transfer-encoding with https inspection.
422 162) When https inspecting, delete generated keys and certificates if
423 the connection to the destination could not be established.
424 Makes silly DoS attacks slightly more complicated.
426 163) Use subdirectories in the certificate-directory to lower the number
427 of files per directory.
429 164) Evaluate switching from pcreposix(3) to pcre's native api
430 for URL matching which allows to compile the patterns once
433 165) Add a max-connections-per-client directive.
435 166) Figure out how to ship Windows binaries with external libraries
436 like pcre and MbedTLS. Required for #142. Somewhat related:
437 https://lists.privoxy.org/pipermail/privoxy-devel/2020-November/000400.html
439 167) Set up a public Privoxy-Filter-Test instance.
441 168) Add a privacy policy.
443 169) Preserve all relevant copyright and license statements in binary
444 packages we distribute.
446 170) Serve the ca-cert-file through the CGI interface so client's
447 can conveniently import it (insecurely).
449 171) Create a "view page using Privoxy" website where users can input
450 an URL and get a screenshot of a browser fetching the URL
453 172) Create a public git repository for Privoxy-Filter-Test.
455 173) Document Privoxy's governance model.
457 174) Let the Tor Onion Service for the privoxy website
458 serve gitweb and the git repository as well.
460 175) Add more screenshots to the documentation and website.
462 176) Find a new fiduciary sponsor as a replacement for Zwiebelfreunde e.V.,
463 so that we can continue to receive tax-deductible donations in Europe.
465 ##########################################################################
467 Hosting wish list (relevant for #53)
472 - Mailinglists (Mailman with public archives preferred)
473 - Webspace (on a Unix-like OS that works with the webserver targets
476 - Commit mails (preferably with unified diffs)
478 (Unsorted) details to look at when evaluating hosters:
480 1. Preferably no third-party ads and trackers.
481 External images, CSS and JavaScript may count as trackers
482 but texts like "supported by company XYZ" may be acceptable.
484 2. JavaScript should be optional or not used at all.
486 3. Services we don't need shouldn't be enabled anyway.
487 (We currently don't use Web forums, wikis, surveys etc.)
489 4. It would be preferable if the hoster didn't have a bad track
490 record as far as user experience, security and privacy are
491 concerned and if the terms of service are "reasonable" and
492 haven't changed too often in the past. Updates in the past
493 should have been improvements and not regressions.
495 5. It would be preferable if most of the server administration
496 is done by a trusted third-party (or at least not a lot of work
499 6. The server(s) should be located in a country with laws we can
500 understand and follow (or at least not unintentionally violate).
502 7. A server location in a country with some kind of due process
503 and strong data protection laws (at least on paper) would be
506 8. Given that Privoxy is a free software project it would be
507 preferable if the hoster would use free software where possible.
509 9. Migrating away from the hoster in the future without losing
510 any important data should be possible without writing web