1 $Id: TODO,v 1.116 2014/06/25 10:03:53 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 1) Add more regression tests. Filters should be tested automatically
10 (variables too). Could probably reuse large parts of Privoxy-Filter-Test.
11 Note that there is currently work in progress to leverage curl's
12 test suite, patches have been submitted upstream:
13 http://curl.haxx.se/mail/lib-2014-06/0070.html
15 3) Fix some more XXX: comments.
17 6) Remove actions that aren't needed anymore:
19 content-type-overwrite should probably stay as it's also
20 used by some of the CGI pages (XXX: name them).
22 crunch-client-header and crunch-server-header should probably
23 go, their only advantage is that their search strings can be
24 controlled through the CGI pages, other than that they only
27 crunch-if-none-match can be replaced with a header filter.
29 prevent-compression has a misleading name and could
30 be replaced with a header filter.
32 7) force-text-mode has a stupid name and should probably
33 be renamed to force-filter-mode.
35 8) handle-as-empty-document and handle-as-image should
36 be merged to something like handle-as{something} to
37 prevent them from being activated at the same time.
39 10) There's a bug in the CGI editor that turns the
40 first section's "Insert new section below" into
41 a "Insert new section above" button.
43 11) CGI templates should use semantically-correct HTML
46 12) Support pipelining for outgoing connections.
48 14) Allow to filter POST parameters.
50 15) If trusted CGI pages are requested without trusted referrer,
51 set the status code to 403 instead of 200.
53 16) Filter SSL encrypted content as well.
55 At the beginning we could use a unencrypted connection between
56 client and Privoxy, and use an encrypted connection between
57 Privoxy and the server.
59 This should be good enough for most of the content the
60 user would want to filter.
62 19) enable-forward-fallback. Syntax? Suggested by K.R.
64 21) User Manual delivery doesn't accept multiple slashes. Should it?
66 22) Verify action files properly (Including arguments) and
67 act accordingly (should probably intercept all requests
68 with a "Invalid option foo detected" CGI page).
70 23) Do the same in case of syntax errors in the configuration file,
71 instead of just exiting or ignoring the problem.
73 25) Handle multiple filters with the same name better. Reject them?
75 26) Let show-url-info detect clearly invalid URLs.
77 27) Make errno logging less thread-unsafe.
78 Verify that it's really an improvement.
80 28) Don't take default ports in case of invalid forwarding ports.
82 31) If a string action foo is disabled csp->action->string[ACTION_STRING_FOO]
83 doesn't necessarily contain NULL, but may contain the string of an
84 enabled foo action in an overruled section. Is it a bug? Does it matter?
86 32) In case of forwarding failures with socks port == 9050,
87 show extra info about Tor (the whole FAQ entry?).
89 36) Unload unused action files directly, even if they are
90 disabled without replacement.
92 38) In the final results, explicitly list disabled multi actions
93 with their parameters. Not as trivial as it sounds.
95 40) When running in daemon mode, Privoxy's working directory is '/'
96 which means it may not have permissions to dump core when necessary.
97 Figure out a way to solve this. Introduce a cwd config option?
99 41) Change documentation framework to one that works cross-platform.
102 42) Add a DTrace USDT provider. Now that FreeBSD has userland DTrace
103 support there's no longer any reason not to.
105 43) Write a tool to check URL patterns against URLs in the log file.
106 This could be included in Privoxy-Regression-Test.
108 44) Privoxy-Log-Parser: Consider highlighting "Connection" in:
109 23:13:03.506 283b6100 Header: Replaced: 'Connection: Keep-Alive' with 'Connection: close'
111 50) Investigate possible PCRS template speedup when searching
112 macros with strstr() before compiling pcrs commands.
113 Investigated, needs some restructuring but is probably worth it.
115 51) Make user-manual directive more generic to allow serving
116 the FAQ and other stuff, too. Consider changing the port
117 for "same origin policy" issues.
119 53) Find a more reliable hoster. Involves finding out what our
120 requirements are and which SF alternatives fulfil them.
121 It would probably also make sense to look into what other
122 projects did when migrating away from SF.
124 2014-05-13: Work in progress. Hosting wish list at the end
127 Interested donors: 1.
129 54) Move away from CVS to a more modern revision control system.
130 Find out if there are any objection against going with Git.
131 Using Git would also have the advantage that SF now pretends
132 to support it, so we could do it independently from 53).
134 55) Apply for Coverity scans: http://scan.coverity.com/
136 58) Move more template strings from the code into the actual templates.
138 59) Import the German template translation.
140 60) Ask the Russian translators for input on how to make their
143 61) Consider (optionally?) skipping the hostname comparison when
144 checking if a connections that goes to a HTTP proxy can be reused.
145 Do all HTTP proxy support that? Is it worth it?
147 63) Reject clearly too large requests earlier?
149 64) Use proper copyright attribution. "Privoxy Developers"
152 65) Polish Website. Probably involves ditching the Docbook
153 mess in favour of wml. There are already several threads
154 in the mailinglist archives about this. See also #41.
156 66) Stop hard-coding the number of action and filter files.
158 67) Clean up source code directory layout. Depends on 54 so
159 we don't lose the revision history.
161 68) Use standard make syntax so we don't depend on GNU make.
163 69) Update autoconf setup (or move away from it).
165 70) If the server connection is reset but the headers are
166 received, consider passing the mess to the client instead
167 of showing the connect-failed template. Relates to #2698674.
169 74) Let Privoxy-Regression-Test optionally check that action
170 sections which disable actions actually are preceded by
171 sections that enable said actions.
173 75) Create a tool that creates Privoxy action (and filter?) files
174 out of adblock files. Could be implemented as option for
175 url-pattern-translator.pl.
177 76) Cache DNS responses. Note that this has been requested
178 several times by users, but is not a developer priority.
179 If you care about this, feel free to submit patches.
181 77) Allow to configure the IP address used in outgoing connections.
183 78) Allow to optionally use pcre's DFA algorithm.
185 79) Evaluate pcre alternatives.
187 80) Change FEATURE_EXTENDED_HOST_PATTERNS to support both
188 extended and vanilla host patterns at the same time.
190 Note that the requirement is to allow the user to decide
191 if the domain pattern should be interpreted as regex or
192 traditional host pattern and if it's not obvious that the
193 user made any decision, default to the latter.
195 Possible solutions would be:
197 1. An always-use-regex-domain-patterns config option
198 2. An enable-regex-domain-patterns-for-this-action-file option
199 3. An enable-regex-domain-patterns-for-this-action-file-until-the-user-says-otherwise option
200 4. A treat-the-domain-pattern-in-this-line-as-regex(-or-not) option
201 5. Combinations of the options above
203 With 2+4, 3+4 or 2+3+4 being the preferences until
206 82) Detect if the system time goes back in time let the user
207 know if it caused any connections to get closed.
209 84) Flesh out the user-manual delivery to serve pages from
210 other directories, too.
212 85) Once #84 is done, write a script that populates a directory with
213 various common third-party icons (stumbleupon.png, facebook.png ...)
214 and redirect requests for them to Privoxy.
216 86) Add a server-body-tagger action. This is trivial as as all the
217 functionality required to do it already exists.
219 87) Add a client-body-tagger action. This is less trivial as we currently
220 don't buffer client bodies. After 14) is implemented it would be
223 88) Investigate if there's a Perl module that Privoxy-Regression-Test
224 could optionally use to keep connections alive, preferably while
225 requiring less forks at the same time.
227 89) When multiple block actions apply, consider showing all the block
228 reasons on the blocked page that haven't been overruled, not just
231 91) Add an optional limit for internal redirects. It would probably
232 be reasonable to default to a limit of one and showing an error
233 message if the request for the redirect URL would be redirected
236 92) The statistics currently aren't calculated correctly by Privoxy
237 as each thread is only counted as one request which is no longer
238 correct. This should be fixed, or the statistic code removed.
239 Privoxy-Log-Parser's provides more detailed statistics, anyway.
241 93) Add a config directive to let Privoxy explicitly request either
242 IPv4 (or IPv6) addresses, even if the system supports both.
243 Could be useful as a workaround for misconfigured setups where the
244 libc returns IPv6 addresses even if there's no IPv6 connectivity.
246 94) Add a config directive to let Privoxy prefer either IPv4 (or IPv6)
247 addresses, instead of trusting the libc to return them in an order
248 that makes sense. Like #93, this could be useful as a workaround
249 for misconfigured setups.
251 95) Support a non-standard client header in CONNECT requests that
252 contains the URL of the requested resource, which is then treated
253 like the request URL.
255 This way the client could opt-in for path-based blocking of https
256 requests. Given that the headers from the CONNECT request aren't
257 forwarded to the destination server, an unencrypted URL should be
258 acceptable if the client and Privoxy are running on the same system
259 or in a trusted environment.
261 96) Filters should be easier to look up. Currently get_filter() has to
262 go through all filters and skip the filter types the caller isn't
265 98) When showing action section on the CGI pages, properly escape
266 line breaks so they can be copy&pasted into action files without
269 99) Figure out a mechanism through which a user can easily enable
270 site-specific action sections that are too aggressive to be
271 enabled by default. This could be similar to the presettings
272 in default.action, but could also be just another action file
273 that isn't used by default.
275 100) Create a cross-platform Privoxy control program and retire
276 the win32 GUI. Integrate support for Privoxy-Regression-Test,
277 Privoxy-Log-Parser, Privoxy-Filter-Test, uagen and similar tools.
279 102) Add an include directive to split the config file into several parts.
281 103) Potential performance improvement for large action files:
282 when figuring out which actions apply, check the action bit mask
283 before pattern matching and skip section that wouldn't modify the
284 actions already set. To increase the impact the sections would have
285 to be applied in reverse.
287 104) The code to modify global_toggle_state should be factored out into
288 a separate function. Currently we mess with it in three different
289 files, but only in w32log.c the tray icon is explicitly set.
290 The logging is inconsistent as well. For details see #3525694.
292 105) Add support for socks authentication.
294 106) actionlist.h should be embedded in a way that causes less text
297 107) Support more pcrs variables, for example $destination-ip-address
298 and $source-ip-address.
300 108) Allow to use a somewhat random string instead of PRIVOXY-FORCE.
302 109) Let log_error() support the format specifier %S which should
303 work like %s but escape new lines like %N. This would be useful
304 to log the result of header filters which may inject new lines.
306 110) Add a global-buffer-limit directive that roughly limits how
307 much malloc'ed memory Privoxy will use and can potentially
308 be smaller than (buffer-limit * max-client-connections).
310 111) Reject requests if hosts and ports in request line and Host
311 header don't match (before filters have been applied).
313 112) If a header filter is used to inject another header by inserting
314 a \r\n (undocumented feature), detect it and split the headers so
315 following header actions do not treat them as a single string.
316 Alternatively add another header injection mechanism.
318 113) Log statistics upon receiving a certain signal (SIGINFO or SIGUSR1).
320 114) Properly deal with status code 100. The current "Continue hack"
321 can cause problems for gpg when uploading keys through Privoxy.
323 115) Add ICAP (RFC 3507) support. FR #3615158.
325 116) Due to the use of sscanf(), Privoxy currently will fail to properly
326 parse chunks whose size can't be represented with 32 bit. This is
327 unlikely to cause problems in the real world, but should eventually
328 be fixed anyway. See also:
329 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=959100
331 118) There should be "escaped" dynamic variables that are guaranteed
332 not to break filters.
334 119) Evaluate using pcre's jit mode.
336 120) Add an option to limit pcre's recursion limit below the default.
337 On some platforms the recursion limit doesn't prevent pcre from
338 running out of stack space, causing the kernel to kill Privoxy
341 121) Add HTTP/2 support. As a first step, incomming HTTP/1.x requests
342 should be translated to outgoing HTTP/2 requests where possible
343 (and if desired by the user).
345 122) Allow customized log messages.
347 123) Evaluate if the voluntarily-disclose-session-keys option in Firefox
348 (and other browsers) can be leveraged. Probably depends on #16.
350 124) Add support for the "lightweight OS capability and sandbox framework"
351 Capsicum. http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/capsicum/
352 Interested donors: 1.
354 125) Allow clients to HTTPS-encrypt the proxy connection.
355 Interested donors: 1.
357 126) Run the Co-Advisor HTTP compliance tests, evaluate the results,
358 fix the compliance issues that aren't by design and document
360 Note that Privoxy developers qualified for free account upgrades:
361 http://coad.measurement-factory.com/details.html#pricing
363 127) Add "real" CGI support (serve program output instead of forwarding
364 the request). The work is mostly done due to +external-filter{}.
366 128) Add a config directive to control the stack limit.
368 129) Completely implement RFC 7230 4.1 (Chunked Transfer Coding).
369 Currently Privoxy doesn't properly deal with trailers which
370 are rarely used in the real world but should be supported anyway.
372 130) Move header_tagger() out of the parser structs and let it execute
373 taggers one-by-one against all headers so the header order has less
374 influence on the tagging result. As a bonus, dynamic taggers would
375 have to be compiled less often.
377 131) The handle-as-empty-doc-returns-ok directive should be replaced with
378 an action so the behaviour can be enabled on a per-request basis.
379 Interested donors: 1.
381 ##########################################################################
383 Hosting wish list (relevant for #53)
388 - Mailinglists (Mailman with public archives preferred)
389 - Webspace (on a Unix-like OS that works with the webserver targets
391 - Source code repositories (currently CVS, but migrating away
392 from it is TODO #54 anyway and shouldn't be too much trouble)
393 - Commit mails (preferably with unified diffs)
395 (Unsorted) details to look at when evaluating hosters:
397 1. Preferably no third-party ads and trackers.
398 External images, CSS and JavaScript may count as trackers
399 but texts like "supported by company XYZ" may be acceptable.
401 2. JavaScript should be optional or not used at all.
403 3. Services we don't need shouldn't be enabled anyway.
404 (We currently don't use Web forums, wikis, surveys etc.)
406 4. It would be preferable if the hoster didn't have a bad track
407 record as far as user experience, security and privacy are
408 concerned and if the terms of service are "reasonable" and
409 haven't changed too often in the past. Updates in the past
410 should have been improvements and not regressions.
412 5. It would be preferable if most of the server administration
413 is done by a trusted third-party (or at least not a lot of work
416 6. The server(s) should be located in a country with laws we can
417 understand and follow (or at least not unintentionally violate).
419 7. A server location in a country with some kind of due process
420 and strong data protection laws (at least on paper) would be
423 8. Given that Privoxy is a free software project it would be
424 preferable if the hoster would use free software where possible.
426 9. Migrating away from the hoster in the future without losing
427 any important data should be possible without writing web