1 $Id: TODO,v 1.68 2012/10/21 12:59:08 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 some regression tests. Filters should be tested automatically
10 (variables too). Could probably reuse large parts of Privoxy-Filter-Test.
12 3) Fix some more XXX: comments.
14 4) Fix some more compiler warnings. (Especially on amd64)
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 49) Add FAQ for NTLM proxies. Still necessary?
113 50) Investigate possible PCRS template speedup when searching
114 macros with strstr() before compiling pcrs commands.
115 Investigated, needs some restructuring but is probably worth it.
117 51) Make user-manual directive more generic to allow serving
118 the FAQ and other stuff, too. Consider changing the port
119 for "same origin policy" issues.
121 53) Find a more reliable hoster. Involves finding out what our
122 requirements are and which SF alternatives fulfil them.
123 It would probably also make sense to look into what other
124 projects did when migrating away from SF.
126 54) Move away from CVS to a more modern revision control system.
127 Find out if there are any objection against going with Git.
128 Using Git would also have the advantage that SF now pretents
129 to support it, so we could do it independently from 53).
131 55) Apply for Coverity scans: http://scan.coverity.com/
133 56) Apply for the "free online access for qualified open-source
134 software projects" for the Co-Advisor HTTP compliance tests:
135 http://coad.measurement-factory.com/details.html#pricing
137 57) Allow piping into external programs to allow more powerful
138 filters and policy decisions. Incomplete support available
139 in Fabian's popen branch.
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 should be already some threads
159 in the mailinglists archives about this. See also #41.
161 66) Increase maximum 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 84) Flesh out the user-manual delivery to serve pages from
215 other directories, too.
217 85) Once #84 is done, write a script that populates a directory with
218 various common third-party icons (stumbleupon.png, facebook.png ...)
219 and redirect requests for them to Privoxy.
221 86) Add a server-body-tagger action. This is trivial as as all the
222 functionallity required to do it already exists.
224 87) Add a client-body-tagger action. This is less trivial as we currently
225 don't buffer client bodies. After 14) is implemented it would be
228 88) Investigate if there's a Perl module that Privoxy-Regression-Test
229 could optionally use to keep connections alive.
231 89) When multiple block actions apply, consider showing all the block
232 reasons on the blocked page that haven't been overruled, not just
235 90) Implement NO-TAG: patterns that enable a section if the
236 provided pattern doesn't match any TAG. This would make
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 ressource, 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) Enabled filters should be easier to look up. Currently most functions
270 that work with filters spent more (duplicated) code on finding
271 filters than on actually doing something useful with them. Dividing
272 filters by type instead of filter file would reduce the lookup-code
275 97) Add support for Tor's 'optimistic data' socks extension.
276 Mostly done, not yet pushed to CVS.
278 98) When showing action section on the CGI pages, properly escape
279 line breaks so they can be copy&pasted into action files without
282 99) Figure out a mechanism through which a user can easily enable
283 site-specific action sections that are too aggressive to be
284 enalbled by default. This could be similiar to the presettings
285 in default.action, but could also be just another action file
286 that isn't used by default.
288 100) Create a cross-platform Privoxy control program and retire
289 the win32 GUI. Integrate support for Privoxy-Regression-Test,
290 Privoxy-Log-Parser, Privoxy-Filter-Test, uagen and similar tools.
292 102) Add an include directive to split the config file into several parts.
294 103) Potential performance improvement for large action files:
295 when figuring out which actions apply, check the action bitmask
296 before pattern matching and skip section that wouldn't modify the
297 actions already set. To increase the impact the sections would have
298 to be applied in reverse.
300 104) The code to modify global_toggle_state should be factored out into
301 a separate function. Currently we mess with it in three different
302 files, but only in w32log.c the tray icon is explicitly set.
303 The logging is inconsistent as well. For details see #3525694.
305 105) Add support for socks authentication.
307 106) actionlist.h should be embedded in a way that causes less text
310 107) Support more pcrs variables, for example $destination-ip-address
311 and $source-ip-address.