1 $Id: TODO,v 1.146 2016/03/30 11:15:02 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
52 12) Support pipelining for outgoing connections.
54 14) Allow to filter POST parameters.
56 15) If trusted CGI pages are requested without trusted referrer,
57 set the status code to 403 instead of 200.
59 16) Filter SSL encrypted content as well.
61 At the beginning we could use a unencrypted connection between
62 client and Privoxy, and use an encrypted connection between
63 Privoxy and the server.
65 This should be good enough for most of the content the
66 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 the FAQ
124 and files from user-specified directories. Consider changing the
125 port 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 The move to git is work in progress:
139 https://sourceforge.net/p/ijbswa/mailman/message/34994343/
141 58) Move more template strings from the code into the actual templates.
143 59) Import the German template translation.
145 60) Ask the Russian translators for input on how to make their
148 61) Consider (optionally?) skipping the hostname comparison when
149 checking if a connections that goes to a HTTP proxy can be reused.
150 Do all HTTP proxy support that? Is it worth it?
152 63) Reject clearly too large requests earlier?
154 64) Use proper copyright attribution. "Privoxy Developers"
157 65) Polish Website. Probably involves ditching the Docbook
158 mess in favour of wml. There are already several threads
159 in the mailinglist archives about this. See also #41.
161 66) Stop hard-coding the number of action and filter files.
163 67) Clean up source code directory layout. Depends on 54 so
164 we don't lose the revision history.
166 68) Use standard make syntax so we don't depend on GNU make.
168 69) Update autoconf setup (or move away from it).
170 70) If the server connection is reset but the headers are
171 received, consider passing the mess to the client instead
172 of showing the connect-failed template. Relates to #2698674.
174 74) Let Privoxy-Regression-Test optionally check that action
175 sections which disable actions actually are preceded by
176 sections that enable said actions.
178 75) Create a tool that creates Privoxy action (and filter?) files
179 out of adblock files. Could be implemented as option for
180 url-pattern-translator.pl.
182 76) Cache DNS responses. Note that this has been requested
183 several times by users, but is not a developer priority.
184 If you care about this, feel free to submit patches.
186 77) Allow to configure the IP address used in outgoing connections.
188 78) Allow to optionally use pcre's DFA algorithm.
190 79) Evaluate pcre alternatives.
192 80) Change FEATURE_EXTENDED_HOST_PATTERNS to support both
193 extended and vanilla host patterns at the same time.
195 Note that the requirement is to allow the user to decide
196 if the domain pattern should be interpreted as regex or
197 traditional host pattern and if it's not obvious that the
198 user made any decision, default to the latter.
200 Possible solutions would be:
202 1. An always-use-regex-domain-patterns config option
203 2. An enable-regex-domain-patterns-for-this-action-file option
204 3. An enable-regex-domain-patterns-for-this-action-file-until-the-user-says-otherwise option
205 4. A treat-the-domain-pattern-in-this-line-as-regex(-or-not) option
206 5. Combinations of the options above
208 With 2+4, 3+4 or 2+3+4 being the preferences until
211 82) Detect if the system time goes back in time let the user
212 know if it caused any connections to get closed.
214 85) Once #84 is done, write a script that populates a directory with
215 various common third-party icons (stumbleupon.png, facebook.png ...)
216 and redirect requests for them to Privoxy.
218 86) Add a server-body-tagger action. This is trivial as as all the
219 functionality required to do it already exists.
221 87) Add a client-body-tagger action. This is less trivial as we currently
222 don't buffer client bodies. After 14) is implemented it would be
225 88) Investigate if there's a Perl module that Privoxy-Regression-Test
226 could optionally use to keep connections alive, preferably while
227 requiring less forks at the same time.
229 89) When multiple block actions apply, consider showing all the block
230 reasons on the blocked page that haven't been overruled, not just
233 91) Add an optional limit for internal redirects. It would probably
234 be reasonable to default to a limit of one and showing an error
235 message if the request for the redirect URL would be redirected
238 92) The statistics currently aren't calculated correctly by Privoxy
239 as each thread is only counted as one request which is no longer
240 correct. This should be fixed, or the statistic code removed.
241 Privoxy-Log-Parser's provides more detailed statistics, anyway.
243 93) Add a config directive to let Privoxy explicitly request either
244 IPv4 (or IPv6) addresses, even if the system supports both.
245 Could be useful as a workaround for misconfigured setups where the
246 libc returns IPv6 addresses even if there's no IPv6 connectivity.
248 94) Add a config directive to let Privoxy prefer either IPv4 (or IPv6)
249 addresses, instead of trusting the libc to return them in an order
250 that makes sense. Like #93, this could be useful as a workaround
251 for misconfigured setups.
253 95) Support a non-standard client header in CONNECT requests that
254 contains the URL of the requested resource, which is then treated
255 like the request URL.
257 This way the client could opt-in for path-based blocking of https
258 requests. Given that the headers from the CONNECT request aren't
259 forwarded to the destination server, an unencrypted URL should be
260 acceptable if the client and Privoxy are running on the same system
261 or in a trusted environment.
263 96) Filters should be easier to look up. Currently get_filter() has to
264 go through all filters and skip the filter types the caller isn't
267 98) When showing action section on the CGI pages, properly escape
268 line breaks so they can be copy&pasted into action files without
271 99) Figure out a mechanism through which a user can easily enable
272 site-specific action sections that are too aggressive to be
273 enabled by default. This could be similar to the presettings
274 in default.action, but could also be just another action file
275 that isn't used by default.
277 100) Create a cross-platform Privoxy control program and retire
278 the win32 GUI. Integrate support for Privoxy-Regression-Test,
279 Privoxy-Log-Parser, Privoxy-Filter-Test, uagen and similar tools.
280 Interested donors: 1.
282 102) Add an include directive to split the config file into several parts.
284 103) Potential performance improvement for large action files:
285 when figuring out which actions apply, check the action bit mask
286 before pattern matching and skip section that wouldn't modify the
287 actions already set. To increase the impact the sections would have
288 to be applied in reverse.
290 104) The code to modify global_toggle_state should be factored out into
291 a separate function. Currently we mess with it in three different
292 files, but only in w32log.c the tray icon is explicitly set.
293 The logging is inconsistent as well. For details see #3525694.
295 105) Add support for socks authentication.
297 106) actionlist.h should be embedded in a way that causes less text
300 107) Support more pcrs variables, for example $destination-ip-address
301 and $source-ip-address.
303 108) Allow to use a somewhat random string instead of PRIVOXY-FORCE.
305 109) Let log_error() support the format specifier %S which should
306 work like %s but escape new lines like %N. This would be useful
307 to log the result of header filters which may inject new lines.
309 110) Add a global-buffer-limit directive that roughly limits how
310 much malloc'ed memory Privoxy will use and can potentially
311 be smaller than (buffer-limit * max-client-connections).
313 111) Reject requests if hosts and ports in request line and Host
314 header don't match (before filters have been applied).
316 112) If a header filter is used to inject another header by inserting
317 a \r\n (undocumented feature), detect it and split the headers so
318 following header actions do not treat them as a single string.
319 Alternatively add another header injection mechanism.
321 113) Log statistics upon receiving a certain signal (SIGINFO or SIGUSR1).
323 114) Properly deal with status code 100. The current "Continue hack"
324 can cause problems for gpg when uploading keys through Privoxy.
326 115) Add ICAP (RFC 3507) support. FR #3615158.
328 116) Due to the use of sscanf(), Privoxy currently will fail to properly
329 parse chunks whose size can't be represented with 32 bit. This is
330 unlikely to cause problems in the real world, but should eventually
331 be fixed anyway. See also:
332 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=959100
334 118) There should be "escaped" dynamic variables that are guaranteed
335 not to break filters.
337 119) Evaluate using pcre's jit mode.
339 120) Add an option to limit pcre's recursion limit below the default.
340 On some platforms the recursion limit doesn't prevent pcre from
341 running out of stack space, causing the kernel to kill Privoxy
344 121) Add HTTP/2 support. As a first step, incomming HTTP/1.x requests
345 should be translated to outgoing HTTP/2 requests where possible
346 (and if desired by the user).
347 Interested donors: 1.
349 122) Allow customized log messages.
351 123) Evaluate if the voluntarily-disclose-session-keys option in Firefox
352 (and other browsers) can be leveraged. Probably depends on #16.
354 124) Add support for the "lightweight OS capability and sandbox framework"
355 Capsicum. http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/capsicum/
356 Interested donors: 1.
358 125) Allow clients to HTTPS-encrypt the proxy connection.
359 Interested donors: 1.
361 126) Run the Co-Advisor HTTP compliance tests, evaluate the results,
362 fix the compliance issues that aren't by design and document
364 Note that Privoxy developers qualify for free account upgrades:
365 http://coad.measurement-factory.com/details.html#pricing
367 127) Add "real" CGI support (serve program output instead of forwarding
368 the request). The work is mostly done due to +external-filter{}.
370 128) Add a config directive to control the stack limit.
372 129) Completely implement RFC 7230 4.1 (Chunked Transfer Coding).
373 Currently Privoxy doesn't properly deal with trailers which
374 are rarely used in the real world but should be supported anyway.
376 130) Move header_tagger() out of the parser structs and let it execute
377 taggers one-by-one against all headers so the header order has less
378 influence on the tagging result. As a bonus, dynamic taggers would
379 have to be compiled less often.
381 131) The handle-as-empty-doc-returns-ok directive should be replaced with
382 an action so the behaviour can be enabled on a per-request basis.
383 Interested donors: 1.
385 133) Consider allowing bitcoin donations.
386 Interested donors: 2.
388 134) Track the total number of bytes written to and received from a socket.
390 135) Add OpenBSM audit support.
392 136) Make builds reproducible.
394 137) Add a (preferably vector-based) logo.
396 138) Bring back the scripts to provide actions file feedback.
398 Once upon a time (~2003) there were scripts on the webserver
399 to make reporting action file feedback more convenient for the
400 user and the actual reports more useful for the developers.
401 They have been unusable for years and have thus been disabled,
402 but making the reporting mechanism available again would be a
405 140) Toggling Privoxy off currently also disables stuff that
406 probably shouldn't be affected (such as actions like
407 forward-override). Investigate and fix or document.
409 141) Port Privoxy to CloudABI, which, despite the name, is actually
410 rather neet. https://github.com/NuxiNL/cloudlibc
412 142) Remove or update the "internal" pcre version.
414 143) Add support for OpenBSD's pledge feature once it's stablelized.
415 This should be a lot less work then #124.
417 146) Allow to save the internal client tag state to disk and
418 load it after restarts.
420 147) Improve "Building from Source" section in the user manual.
421 A common problem seems to be that it's not obvious to non-technical
422 users how the listed dependencies can be installed on the commonly
423 used platforms. Adding a couple of examples should also be useful for
424 technical users (like Privoxy developers) who want to install or test
425 Privoxy on platforms they are not familiar with.
427 148) Add a config directive to change the CGI_SITE_2_HOST
428 (default: config.privoxy.org).
430 If Privoxy is used as reverse proxy or intercepting proxy without
431 getting intercepted requests, error pages created from default templates
432 currently can result in client requests to config.privoxy.org on the
433 Internet which may not be desirable.
435 ##########################################################################
437 Hosting wish list (relevant for #53)
442 - Mailinglists (Mailman with public archives preferred)
443 - Webspace (on a Unix-like OS that works with the webserver targets
445 - Source code repositories (currently CVS, but migrating away
446 from it is TODO #54 anyway and shouldn't be too much trouble)
447 - Commit mails (preferably with unified diffs)
449 (Unsorted) details to look at when evaluating hosters:
451 1. Preferably no third-party ads and trackers.
452 External images, CSS and JavaScript may count as trackers
453 but texts like "supported by company XYZ" may be acceptable.
455 2. JavaScript should be optional or not used at all.
457 3. Services we don't need shouldn't be enabled anyway.
458 (We currently don't use Web forums, wikis, surveys etc.)
460 4. It would be preferable if the hoster didn't have a bad track
461 record as far as user experience, security and privacy are
462 concerned and if the terms of service are "reasonable" and
463 haven't changed too often in the past. Updates in the past
464 should have been improvements and not regressions.
466 5. It would be preferable if most of the server administration
467 is done by a trusted third-party (or at least not a lot of work
470 6. The server(s) should be located in a country with laws we can
471 understand and follow (or at least not unintentionally violate).
473 7. A server location in a country with some kind of due process
474 and strong data protection laws (at least on paper) would be
477 8. Given that Privoxy is a free software project it would be
478 preferable if the hoster would use free software where possible.
480 9. Migrating away from the hoster in the future without losing
481 any important data should be possible without writing web