1 $Id: TODO,v 1.137 2015/12/27 16:41:17 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.privoxy.org/faq/general.html#DONATE
13 1) Add more regression tests. Filters should be tested automatically
14 (variables too). Could probably reuse large parts of Privoxy-Filter-Test.
15 Note that there is currently work in progress to leverage curl's
16 test suite, patches have been submitted upstream:
17 http://curl.haxx.se/mail/lib-2014-06/0070.html
19 3) Fix some more XXX: comments.
21 6) Remove actions that aren't needed anymore:
23 content-type-overwrite should probably stay as it's also
24 used by some of the CGI pages (XXX: name them).
26 crunch-client-header and crunch-server-header should probably
27 go, their only advantage is that their search strings can be
28 controlled through the CGI pages, other than that they only
31 crunch-if-none-match can be replaced with a header filter.
33 prevent-compression has a misleading name and could
34 be replaced with a header filter.
36 7) force-text-mode has a stupid name and should probably
37 be renamed to force-filter-mode.
39 8) handle-as-empty-document and handle-as-image should
40 be merged to something like handle-as{something} to
41 prevent them from being activated at the same time.
43 10) There's a bug in the CGI editor that turns the
44 first section's "Insert new section below" into
45 a "Insert new section above" button.
47 11) CGI templates should use semantically-correct HTML
50 12) Support pipelining for outgoing connections.
52 14) Allow to filter POST parameters.
54 15) If trusted CGI pages are requested without trusted referrer,
55 set the status code to 403 instead of 200.
57 16) Filter SSL encrypted content as well.
59 At the beginning we could use a unencrypted connection between
60 client and Privoxy, and use an encrypted connection between
61 Privoxy and the server.
63 This should be good enough for most of the content the
64 user would want to filter.
68 19) enable-forward-fallback. Syntax? Suggested by K.R.
70 21) User Manual delivery doesn't accept multiple slashes. Should it?
72 22) Verify action files properly (Including arguments) and
73 act accordingly (should probably intercept all requests
74 with a "Invalid option foo detected" CGI page).
76 23) Do the same in case of syntax errors in the configuration file,
77 instead of just exiting or ignoring the problem.
79 25) Handle multiple filters with the same name better. Reject them?
81 26) Let show-url-info detect clearly invalid URLs.
83 27) Make errno logging less thread-unsafe.
84 Verify that it's really an improvement.
86 28) Don't take default ports in case of invalid forwarding ports.
88 31) If a string action foo is disabled csp->action->string[ACTION_STRING_FOO]
89 doesn't necessarily contain NULL, but may contain the string of an
90 enabled foo action in an overruled section. Is it a bug? Does it matter?
92 32) In case of forwarding failures with socks port == 9050,
93 show extra info about Tor (the whole FAQ entry?).
95 36) Unload unused action files directly, even if they are
96 disabled without replacement.
98 38) In the final results, explicitly list disabled multi actions
99 with their parameters. Not as trivial as it sounds.
101 40) When running in daemon mode, Privoxy's working directory is '/'
102 which means it may not have permissions to dump core when necessary.
103 Figure out a way to solve this. Introduce a cwd config option?
105 41) Change documentation framework to one that works cross-platform.
108 42) Add a DTrace USDT provider. Now that FreeBSD has userland DTrace
109 support there's no longer any reason not to.
111 43) Write a tool to check URL patterns against URLs in the log file.
112 This could be included in Privoxy-Regression-Test.
114 44) Privoxy-Log-Parser: Consider highlighting "Connection" in:
115 23:13:03.506 283b6100 Header: Replaced: 'Connection: Keep-Alive' with 'Connection: close'
117 50) Investigate possible PCRS template speedup when searching
118 macros with strstr() before compiling pcrs commands.
119 Investigated, needs some restructuring but is probably worth it.
121 51) Make user-manual directive more generic to allow serving the FAQ
122 and files from user-specified directories. Consider changing the
123 port for "same origin policy" issues.
125 53) Find a more reliable hoster. Involves finding out what our
126 requirements are and which SF alternatives fulfil them.
127 It would probably also make sense to look into what other
128 projects did when migrating away from SF.
130 2014-05-13: Work in progress. Hosting wish list at the end
133 Interested donors: 1.
135 54) Move away from CVS to a more modern revision control system.
136 Find out if there are any objection against going with Git.
137 Using Git would also have the advantage that SF now pretends
138 to support it, so we could do it independently from 53).
140 58) Move more template strings from the code into the actual templates.
142 59) Import the German template translation.
144 60) Ask the Russian translators for input on how to make their
147 61) Consider (optionally?) skipping the hostname comparison when
148 checking if a connections that goes to a HTTP proxy can be reused.
149 Do all HTTP proxy support that? Is it worth it?
151 63) Reject clearly too large requests earlier?
153 64) Use proper copyright attribution. "Privoxy Developers"
156 65) Polish Website. Probably involves ditching the Docbook
157 mess in favour of wml. There are already several threads
158 in the mailinglist archives about this. See also #41.
160 66) Stop hard-coding the number of action and filter files.
162 67) Clean up source code directory layout. Depends on 54 so
163 we don't lose the revision history.
165 68) Use standard make syntax so we don't depend on GNU make.
167 69) Update autoconf setup (or move away from it).
169 70) If the server connection is reset but the headers are
170 received, consider passing the mess to the client instead
171 of showing the connect-failed template. Relates to #2698674.
173 74) Let Privoxy-Regression-Test optionally check that action
174 sections which disable actions actually are preceded by
175 sections that enable said actions.
177 75) Create a tool that creates Privoxy action (and filter?) files
178 out of adblock files. Could be implemented as option for
179 url-pattern-translator.pl.
181 76) Cache DNS responses. Note that this has been requested
182 several times by users, but is not a developer priority.
183 If you care about this, feel free to submit patches.
185 77) Allow to configure the IP address used in outgoing connections.
187 78) Allow to optionally use pcre's DFA algorithm.
189 79) Evaluate pcre alternatives.
191 80) Change FEATURE_EXTENDED_HOST_PATTERNS to support both
192 extended and vanilla host patterns at the same time.
194 Note that the requirement is to allow the user to decide
195 if the domain pattern should be interpreted as regex or
196 traditional host pattern and if it's not obvious that the
197 user made any decision, default to the latter.
199 Possible solutions would be:
201 1. An always-use-regex-domain-patterns config option
202 2. An enable-regex-domain-patterns-for-this-action-file option
203 3. An enable-regex-domain-patterns-for-this-action-file-until-the-user-says-otherwise option
204 4. A treat-the-domain-pattern-in-this-line-as-regex(-or-not) option
205 5. Combinations of the options above
207 With 2+4, 3+4 or 2+3+4 being the preferences until
210 82) Detect if the system time goes back in time let the user
211 know if it caused any connections to get closed.
213 85) Once #84 is done, write a script that populates a directory with
214 various common third-party icons (stumbleupon.png, facebook.png ...)
215 and redirect requests for them to Privoxy.
217 86) Add a server-body-tagger action. This is trivial as as all the
218 functionality required to do it already exists.
220 87) Add a client-body-tagger action. This is less trivial as we currently
221 don't buffer client bodies. After 14) is implemented it would be
224 88) Investigate if there's a Perl module that Privoxy-Regression-Test
225 could optionally use to keep connections alive, preferably while
226 requiring less forks at the same time.
228 89) When multiple block actions apply, consider showing all the block
229 reasons on the blocked page that haven't been overruled, not just
232 91) Add an optional limit for internal redirects. It would probably
233 be reasonable to default to a limit of one and showing an error
234 message if the request for the redirect URL would be redirected
237 92) The statistics currently aren't calculated correctly by Privoxy
238 as each thread is only counted as one request which is no longer
239 correct. This should be fixed, or the statistic code removed.
240 Privoxy-Log-Parser's provides more detailed statistics, anyway.
242 93) Add a config directive to let Privoxy explicitly request either
243 IPv4 (or IPv6) addresses, even if the system supports both.
244 Could be useful as a workaround for misconfigured setups where the
245 libc returns IPv6 addresses even if there's no IPv6 connectivity.
247 94) Add a config directive to let Privoxy prefer either IPv4 (or IPv6)
248 addresses, instead of trusting the libc to return them in an order
249 that makes sense. Like #93, this could be useful as a workaround
250 for misconfigured setups.
252 95) Support a non-standard client header in CONNECT requests that
253 contains the URL of the requested resource, which is then treated
254 like the request URL.
256 This way the client could opt-in for path-based blocking of https
257 requests. Given that the headers from the CONNECT request aren't
258 forwarded to the destination server, an unencrypted URL should be
259 acceptable if the client and Privoxy are running on the same system
260 or in a trusted environment.
262 96) Filters should be easier to look up. Currently get_filter() has to
263 go through all filters and skip the filter types the caller isn't
266 98) When showing action section on the CGI pages, properly escape
267 line breaks so they can be copy&pasted into action files without
270 99) Figure out a mechanism through which a user can easily enable
271 site-specific action sections that are too aggressive to be
272 enabled by default. This could be similar to the presettings
273 in default.action, but could also be just another action file
274 that isn't used by default.
276 100) Create a cross-platform Privoxy control program and retire
277 the win32 GUI. Integrate support for Privoxy-Regression-Test,
278 Privoxy-Log-Parser, Privoxy-Filter-Test, uagen and similar tools.
280 102) Add an include directive to split the config file into several parts.
282 103) Potential performance improvement for large action files:
283 when figuring out which actions apply, check the action bit mask
284 before pattern matching and skip section that wouldn't modify the
285 actions already set. To increase the impact the sections would have
286 to be applied in reverse.
288 104) The code to modify global_toggle_state should be factored out into
289 a separate function. Currently we mess with it in three different
290 files, but only in w32log.c the tray icon is explicitly set.
291 The logging is inconsistent as well. For details see #3525694.
293 105) Add support for socks authentication.
295 106) actionlist.h should be embedded in a way that causes less text
298 107) Support more pcrs variables, for example $destination-ip-address
299 and $source-ip-address.
301 108) Allow to use a somewhat random string instead of PRIVOXY-FORCE.
303 109) Let log_error() support the format specifier %S which should
304 work like %s but escape new lines like %N. This would be useful
305 to log the result of header filters which may inject new lines.
307 110) Add a global-buffer-limit directive that roughly limits how
308 much malloc'ed memory Privoxy will use and can potentially
309 be smaller than (buffer-limit * max-client-connections).
311 111) Reject requests if hosts and ports in request line and Host
312 header don't match (before filters have been applied).
314 112) If a header filter is used to inject another header by inserting
315 a \r\n (undocumented feature), detect it and split the headers so
316 following header actions do not treat them as a single string.
317 Alternatively add another header injection mechanism.
319 113) Log statistics upon receiving a certain signal (SIGINFO or SIGUSR1).
321 114) Properly deal with status code 100. The current "Continue hack"
322 can cause problems for gpg when uploading keys through Privoxy.
324 115) Add ICAP (RFC 3507) support. FR #3615158.
326 116) Due to the use of sscanf(), Privoxy currently will fail to properly
327 parse chunks whose size can't be represented with 32 bit. This is
328 unlikely to cause problems in the real world, but should eventually
329 be fixed anyway. See also:
330 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=959100
332 118) There should be "escaped" dynamic variables that are guaranteed
333 not to break filters.
335 119) Evaluate using pcre's jit mode.
337 120) Add an option to limit pcre's recursion limit below the default.
338 On some platforms the recursion limit doesn't prevent pcre from
339 running out of stack space, causing the kernel to kill Privoxy
342 121) Add HTTP/2 support. As a first step, incomming HTTP/1.x requests
343 should be translated to outgoing HTTP/2 requests where possible
344 (and if desired by the user).
346 122) Allow customized log messages.
348 123) Evaluate if the voluntarily-disclose-session-keys option in Firefox
349 (and other browsers) can be leveraged. Probably depends on #16.
351 124) Add support for the "lightweight OS capability and sandbox framework"
352 Capsicum. http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/capsicum/
353 Interested donors: 1.
355 125) Allow clients to HTTPS-encrypt the proxy connection.
356 Interested donors: 1.
358 126) Run the Co-Advisor HTTP compliance tests, evaluate the results,
359 fix the compliance issues that aren't by design and document
361 Note that Privoxy developers qualify for free account upgrades:
362 http://coad.measurement-factory.com/details.html#pricing
364 127) Add "real" CGI support (serve program output instead of forwarding
365 the request). The work is mostly done due to +external-filter{}.
367 128) Add a config directive to control the stack limit.
369 129) Completely implement RFC 7230 4.1 (Chunked Transfer Coding).
370 Currently Privoxy doesn't properly deal with trailers which
371 are rarely used in the real world but should be supported anyway.
373 130) Move header_tagger() out of the parser structs and let it execute
374 taggers one-by-one against all headers so the header order has less
375 influence on the tagging result. As a bonus, dynamic taggers would
376 have to be compiled less often.
378 131) The handle-as-empty-doc-returns-ok directive should be replaced with
379 an action so the behaviour can be enabled on a per-request basis.
380 Interested donors: 1.
382 132) Provide a Tor hidden service to reach the Privoxy website.
383 Work in progress: http://jvauzb4sb3bwlsnc.onion/
384 This hidden service serves a copy of the www.privoxy.org content
385 (filtered through Privoxy to replace some absolute URLs).
386 Interested donors: 1.
388 133) Consider allowing bitcoin donations.
389 Interested donors: 2.
391 134) Track the total number of bytes written to and received from a socket.
393 135) Add OpenBSM audit support.
395 136) Make builds reproducible.
397 137) Add a (preferably vector-based) logo.
399 138) Bring back the scripts to provide actions file feedback.
401 Once upon a time (~2003) there were scripts on the webserver
402 to make reporting action file feedback more convenient for the
403 user and the actual reports more useful for the developers.
404 They have been unusable for years and have thus been disabled,
405 but making the reporting mechanism available again would be a
408 141) Port Privoxy to CloudABI, which, despite the name, is actually
409 rather neet. https://github.com/NuxiNL/cloudlibc
411 142) Remove or update the "internal" pcre version.
413 143) Add support for OpenBSD's pledge feature once it's stablelized.
414 This should be a lot less work then #124.
416 144) Allow Privoxy admins to pre-define tags that are be set for
417 clients that previously opted-in through the CGI interface.
419 This would be useful in multi-user setups where admins may
420 want to allow users to disable certain actions and filters
421 for themselves without affecting others.
423 Even in single-user setups this could be useful to allow
424 more fine-grained toggling. For example to disable request
425 blocking while still crunching cookies, or to disable
426 experimental filters only.
428 Interested donors: 1.
430 145) Once #144 is implemented, allow clients to opt-in to the
431 tagging for a limited amount of time (or number of requests).
433 Interested donors: 1.
435 146) Once #144 is implemented, optionally allow to save the opt-in
438 ##########################################################################
440 Hosting wish list (relevant for #53)
445 - Mailinglists (Mailman with public archives preferred)
446 - Webspace (on a Unix-like OS that works with the webserver targets
448 - Source code repositories (currently CVS, but migrating away
449 from it is TODO #54 anyway and shouldn't be too much trouble)
450 - Commit mails (preferably with unified diffs)
452 (Unsorted) details to look at when evaluating hosters:
454 1. Preferably no third-party ads and trackers.
455 External images, CSS and JavaScript may count as trackers
456 but texts like "supported by company XYZ" may be acceptable.
458 2. JavaScript should be optional or not used at all.
460 3. Services we don't need shouldn't be enabled anyway.
461 (We currently don't use Web forums, wikis, surveys etc.)
463 4. It would be preferable if the hoster didn't have a bad track
464 record as far as user experience, security and privacy are
465 concerned and if the terms of service are "reasonable" and
466 haven't changed too often in the past. Updates in the past
467 should have been improvements and not regressions.
469 5. It would be preferable if most of the server administration
470 is done by a trusted third-party (or at least not a lot of work
473 6. The server(s) should be located in a country with laws we can
474 understand and follow (or at least not unintentionally violate).
476 7. A server location in a country with some kind of due process
477 and strong data protection laws (at least on paper) would be
480 8. Given that Privoxy is a free software project it would be
481 preferable if the hoster would use free software where possible.
483 9. Migrating away from the hoster in the future without losing
484 any important data should be possible without writing web