1 $Id: TODO,v 1.72 2013/01/05 18:37:52 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.
11 Note that there is currently work in progress to leverage curl's
12 test suite which could be used for this as well.
14 3) Fix some more XXX: comments.
16 4) Fix some more compiler warnings. (Especially on amd64)
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
48 12) Support pipelining for outgoing connections.
50 14) Allow to filter POST parameters.
52 15) If trusted CGI pages are requested without trusted referrer,
53 set the status code to 403 instead of 200.
55 16) Filter SSL encrypted content as well.
57 At the beginning we could use a unencrypted connection between
58 client and Privoxy, and use an encrypted connection between
59 Privoxy and the server.
61 This should be good enough for most of the content the
62 user would want to filter.
64 19) enable-forward-fallback. Syntax? Suggested by K.R.
66 21) User Manual delivery doesn't accept multiple slashes. Should it?
68 22) Verify action files properly (Including arguments) and
69 act accordingly (should probably intercept all requests
70 with a "Invalid option foo detected" CGI page).
72 23) Do the same in case of syntax errors in the configuration file,
73 instead of just exiting or ignoring the problem.
75 25) Handle multiple filters with the same name better. Reject them?
77 26) Let show-url-info detect clearly invalid URLs.
79 27) Make errno logging less thread-unsafe.
80 Verify that it's really an improvement.
82 28) Don't take default ports in case of invalid forwarding ports.
84 31) If a string action foo is disabled csp->action->string[ACTION_STRING_FOO]
85 doesn't necessarily contain NULL, but may contain the string of an
86 enabled foo action in an overruled section. Is it a bug? Does it matter?
88 32) In case of forwarding failures with socks port == 9050,
89 show extra info about Tor (the whole FAQ entry?).
91 36) Unload unused action files directly, even if they are
92 disabled without replacement.
94 38) In the final results, explicitly list disabled multi actions
95 with their parameters. Not as trivial as it sounds.
97 40) When running in daemon mode, Privoxy's working directory is '/'
98 which means it may not have permissions to dump core when necessary.
99 Figure out a way to solve this. Introduce a cwd config option?
101 41) Change documentation framework to one that works cross-platform.
104 42) Add a DTrace USDT provider. Now that FreeBSD has userland DTrace
105 support there's no longer any reason not to.
107 43) Write a tool to check URL patterns against URLs in the log file.
108 This could be included in Privoxy-Regression-Test.
110 44) Privoxy-Log-Parser: Consider highlighting "Connection" in:
111 23:13:03.506 283b6100 Header: Replaced: 'Connection: Keep-Alive' with 'Connection: close'
113 49) Add FAQ for NTLM proxies. Still necessary?
115 50) Investigate possible PCRS template speedup when searching
116 macros with strstr() before compiling pcrs commands.
117 Investigated, needs some restructuring but is probably worth it.
119 51) Make user-manual directive more generic to allow serving
120 the FAQ and other stuff, too. Consider changing the port
121 for "same origin policy" issues.
123 53) Find a more reliable hoster. Involves finding out what our
124 requirements are and which SF alternatives fulfil them.
125 It would probably also make sense to look into what other
126 projects did when migrating away from SF.
128 54) Move away from CVS to a more modern revision control system.
129 Find out if there are any objection against going with Git.
130 Using Git would also have the advantage that SF now pretents
131 to support it, so we could do it independently from 53).
133 55) Apply for Coverity scans: http://scan.coverity.com/
135 56) Apply for the "free online access for qualified open-source
136 software projects" for the Co-Advisor HTTP compliance tests:
137 http://coad.measurement-factory.com/details.html#pricing
139 57) Allow piping into external programs to allow more powerful
140 filters and policy decisions. Incomplete support available
141 in Fabian's popen branch.
143 58) Move more template strings from the code into the actual templates.
145 59) Import the German template translation.
147 60) Ask the Russian translators for input on how to make their
150 61) Consider (optionally?) skipping the hostname comparison when
151 checking if a connections that goes to a HTTP proxy can be reused.
152 Do all HTTP proxy support that? Is it worth it?
154 63) Reject clearly too large requests earlier?
156 64) Use proper copyright attribution. "Privoxy Developers"
159 65) Polish Website. Probably involves ditching the Docbook
160 mess in favour of wml. There should be already some threads
161 in the mailinglists archives about this. See also #41.
163 66) Increase maximum number of action and filter files.
165 67) Clean up source code directory layout. Depends on 54 so
166 we don't lose the revision history.
168 68) Use standard make syntax so we don't depend on GNU make.
170 69) Update autoconf setup (or move away from it).
172 70) If the server connection is reset but the headers are
173 received, consider passing the mess to the client instead
174 of showing the connect-failed template. Relates to #2698674.
176 74) Let Privoxy-Regression-Test optionally check that action
177 sections which disable actions actually are preceded by
178 sections that enable said actions.
180 75) Create a tool that creates Privoxy action (and filter?) files
181 out of adblock files. Could be implemented as option for
182 url-pattern-translator.pl.
184 76) Cache DNS responses. Note that this has been requested
185 several times by users, but is not a developer priority.
186 If you care about this, feel free to submit patches.
188 77) Allow to configure the IP address used in outgoing connections.
190 78) Allow to optionally use pcre's DFA algorithm.
192 79) Evaluate pcre alternatives.
194 80) Change FEATURE_EXTENDED_HOST_PATTERNS to support both
195 extended and vanilla host patterns at the same time.
197 Note that the requirement is to allow the user to decide
198 if the domain pattern should be interpreted as regex or
199 traditional host pattern and if it's not obvious that the
200 user made any decision, default to the latter.
202 Possible solutions would be:
204 1. An always-use-regex-domain-patterns config option
205 2. An enable-regex-domain-patterns-for-this-action-file option
206 3. An enable-regex-domain-patterns-for-this-action-file-until-the-user-says-otherwise option
207 4. A treat-the-domain-pattern-in-this-line-as-regex(-or-not) option
208 5. Combinations of the options above
210 With 2+4, 3+4 or 2+3+4 being the preferences until
213 82) Detect if the system time goes back in time let the user
214 know if it caused any connections to get closed.
216 84) Flesh out the user-manual delivery to serve pages from
217 other directories, too.
219 85) Once #84 is done, write a script that populates a directory with
220 various common third-party icons (stumbleupon.png, facebook.png ...)
221 and redirect requests for them to Privoxy.
223 86) Add a server-body-tagger action. This is trivial as as all the
224 functionallity required to do it already exists.
226 87) Add a client-body-tagger action. This is less trivial as we currently
227 don't buffer client bodies. After 14) is implemented it would be
230 88) Investigate if there's a Perl module that Privoxy-Regression-Test
231 could optionally use to keep connections alive, preferably while
232 requiring less forks at the same time.
234 89) When multiple block actions apply, consider showing all the block
235 reasons on the blocked page that haven't been overruled, not just
238 90) Implement NO-TAG: patterns that enable a section if the
239 provided pattern doesn't match any TAG. This would make
242 91) Add an optional limit for internal redirects. It would probably
243 be reasonable to default to a limit of one and showing an error
244 message if the request for the redirect URL would be redirected
247 92) The statistics currently aren't calculated correctly by Privoxy
248 as each thread is only counted as one request which is no longer
249 correct. This should be fixed, or the statistic code removed.
250 Privoxy-Log-Parser's provides more detailed statistics, anyway.
252 93) Add a config directive to let Privoxy explicitly request either
253 IPv4 (or IPv6) addresses, even if the system supports both.
254 Could be useful as a workaround for misconfigured setups where the
255 libc returns IPv6 addresses even if there's no IPv6 connectivity.
257 94) Add a config directive to let Privoxy prefer either IPv4 (or IPv6)
258 addresses, instead of trusting the libc to return them in an order
259 that makes sense. Like #93, this could be useful as a workaround
260 for misconfigured setups.
262 95) Support a non-standard client header in CONNECT requests that
263 contains the URL of the requested ressource, which is then treated
264 like the request URL.
266 This way the client could opt-in for path-based blocking of https
267 requests. Given that the headers from the CONNECT request aren't
268 forwarded to the destination server, an unencrypted URL should be
269 acceptable if the client and Privoxy are running on the same system
270 or in a trusted environment.
272 96) Enabled filters should be easier to look up. Currently most functions
273 that work with filters spent more (duplicated) code on finding
274 filters than on actually doing something useful with them. Dividing
275 filters by type instead of filter file would reduce the lookup-code
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.
313 108) Allow to use a somewhat random string intead of PRIVOXY-FORCE.