1 $Id: TODO,v 1.104 2014/05/12 10:38:54 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 6) Remove actions that aren't needed anymore:
18 content-type-overwrite should probably stay as it's also
19 used by some of the CGI pages (XXX: name them).
21 crunch-client-header and crunch-server-header should probably
22 go, their only advantage is that their search strings can be
23 controlled through the CGI pages, other than that they only
26 crunch-if-none-match can be replaced with a header filter.
28 prevent-compression has a misleading name and could
29 be replaced with a header filter.
31 7) force-text-mode has a stupid name and should probably
32 be renamed to force-filter-mode.
34 8) handle-as-empty-document and handle-as-image should
35 be merged to something like handle-as{something} to
36 prevent them from being activated at the same time.
38 10) There's a bug in the CGI editor that turns the
39 first section's "Insert new section below" into
40 a "Insert new section above" button.
42 11) CGI templates should use semantically-correct HTML
45 12) Support pipelining for outgoing connections.
47 14) Allow to filter POST parameters.
49 15) If trusted CGI pages are requested without trusted referrer,
50 set the status code to 403 instead of 200.
52 16) Filter SSL encrypted content as well.
54 At the beginning we could use a unencrypted connection between
55 client and Privoxy, and use an encrypted connection between
56 Privoxy and the server.
58 This should be good enough for most of the content the
59 user would want to filter.
61 19) enable-forward-fallback. Syntax? Suggested by K.R.
63 21) User Manual delivery doesn't accept multiple slashes. Should it?
65 22) Verify action files properly (Including arguments) and
66 act accordingly (should probably intercept all requests
67 with a "Invalid option foo detected" CGI page).
69 23) Do the same in case of syntax errors in the configuration file,
70 instead of just exiting or ignoring the problem.
72 25) Handle multiple filters with the same name better. Reject them?
74 26) Let show-url-info detect clearly invalid URLs.
76 27) Make errno logging less thread-unsafe.
77 Verify that it's really an improvement.
79 28) Don't take default ports in case of invalid forwarding ports.
81 31) If a string action foo is disabled csp->action->string[ACTION_STRING_FOO]
82 doesn't necessarily contain NULL, but may contain the string of an
83 enabled foo action in an overruled section. Is it a bug? Does it matter?
85 32) In case of forwarding failures with socks port == 9050,
86 show extra info about Tor (the whole FAQ entry?).
88 36) Unload unused action files directly, even if they are
89 disabled without replacement.
91 38) In the final results, explicitly list disabled multi actions
92 with their parameters. Not as trivial as it sounds.
94 40) When running in daemon mode, Privoxy's working directory is '/'
95 which means it may not have permissions to dump core when necessary.
96 Figure out a way to solve this. Introduce a cwd config option?
98 41) Change documentation framework to one that works cross-platform.
101 42) Add a DTrace USDT provider. Now that FreeBSD has userland DTrace
102 support there's no longer any reason not to.
104 43) Write a tool to check URL patterns against URLs in the log file.
105 This could be included in Privoxy-Regression-Test.
107 44) Privoxy-Log-Parser: Consider highlighting "Connection" in:
108 23:13:03.506 283b6100 Header: Replaced: 'Connection: Keep-Alive' with 'Connection: close'
110 50) Investigate possible PCRS template speedup when searching
111 macros with strstr() before compiling pcrs commands.
112 Investigated, needs some restructuring but is probably worth it.
114 51) Make user-manual directive more generic to allow serving
115 the FAQ and other stuff, too. Consider changing the port
116 for "same origin policy" issues.
118 53) Find a more reliable hoster. Involves finding out what our
119 requirements are and which SF alternatives fulfil them.
120 It would probably also make sense to look into what other
121 projects did when migrating away from SF.
123 54) Move away from CVS to a more modern revision control system.
124 Find out if there are any objection against going with Git.
125 Using Git would also have the advantage that SF now pretends
126 to support it, so we could do it independently from 53).
128 55) Apply for Coverity scans: http://scan.coverity.com/
130 56) Apply for the "free online access for qualified open-source
131 software projects" for the Co-Advisor HTTP compliance tests:
132 http://coad.measurement-factory.com/details.html#pricing
133 (Application sent at 2014-05-12)
135 57) Allow piping into external programs to allow more powerful
136 filters and policy decisions. Incomplete support available
137 in Fabian's popen branch.
139 58) Move more template strings from the code into the actual templates.
141 59) Import the German template translation.
143 60) Ask the Russian translators for input on how to make their
146 61) Consider (optionally?) skipping the hostname comparison when
147 checking if a connections that goes to a HTTP proxy can be reused.
148 Do all HTTP proxy support that? Is it worth it?
150 63) Reject clearly too large requests earlier?
152 64) Use proper copyright attribution. "Privoxy Developers"
155 65) Polish Website. Probably involves ditching the Docbook
156 mess in favour of wml. There are already several threads
157 in the mailinglist archives about this. See also #41.
159 66) Stop hard-coding the number of action and filter files.
161 67) Clean up source code directory layout. Depends on 54 so
162 we don't lose the revision history.
164 68) Use standard make syntax so we don't depend on GNU make.
166 69) Update autoconf setup (or move away from it).
168 70) If the server connection is reset but the headers are
169 received, consider passing the mess to the client instead
170 of showing the connect-failed template. Relates to #2698674.
172 74) Let Privoxy-Regression-Test optionally check that action
173 sections which disable actions actually are preceded by
174 sections that enable said actions.
176 75) Create a tool that creates Privoxy action (and filter?) files
177 out of adblock files. Could be implemented as option for
178 url-pattern-translator.pl.
180 76) Cache DNS responses. Note that this has been requested
181 several times by users, but is not a developer priority.
182 If you care about this, feel free to submit patches.
184 77) Allow to configure the IP address used in outgoing connections.
186 78) Allow to optionally use pcre's DFA algorithm.
188 79) Evaluate pcre alternatives.
190 80) Change FEATURE_EXTENDED_HOST_PATTERNS to support both
191 extended and vanilla host patterns at the same time.
193 Note that the requirement is to allow the user to decide
194 if the domain pattern should be interpreted as regex or
195 traditional host pattern and if it's not obvious that the
196 user made any decision, default to the latter.
198 Possible solutions would be:
200 1. An always-use-regex-domain-patterns config option
201 2. An enable-regex-domain-patterns-for-this-action-file option
202 3. An enable-regex-domain-patterns-for-this-action-file-until-the-user-says-otherwise option
203 4. A treat-the-domain-pattern-in-this-line-as-regex(-or-not) option
204 5. Combinations of the options above
206 With 2+4, 3+4 or 2+3+4 being the preferences until
209 82) Detect if the system time goes back in time let the user
210 know if it caused any connections to get closed.
212 84) Flesh out the user-manual delivery to serve pages from
213 other directories, too.
215 85) Once #84 is done, write a script that populates a directory with
216 various common third-party icons (stumbleupon.png, facebook.png ...)
217 and redirect requests for them to Privoxy.
219 86) Add a server-body-tagger action. This is trivial as as all the
220 functionality required to do it already exists.
222 87) Add a client-body-tagger action. This is less trivial as we currently
223 don't buffer client bodies. After 14) is implemented it would be
226 88) Investigate if there's a Perl module that Privoxy-Regression-Test
227 could optionally use to keep connections alive, preferably while
228 requiring less forks at the same time.
230 89) When multiple block actions apply, consider showing all the block
231 reasons on the blocked page that haven't been overruled, not just
234 91) Add an optional limit for internal redirects. It would probably
235 be reasonable to default to a limit of one and showing an error
236 message if the request for the redirect URL would be redirected
239 92) The statistics currently aren't calculated correctly by Privoxy
240 as each thread is only counted as one request which is no longer
241 correct. This should be fixed, or the statistic code removed.
242 Privoxy-Log-Parser's provides more detailed statistics, anyway.
244 93) Add a config directive to let Privoxy explicitly request either
245 IPv4 (or IPv6) addresses, even if the system supports both.
246 Could be useful as a workaround for misconfigured setups where the
247 libc returns IPv6 addresses even if there's no IPv6 connectivity.
249 94) Add a config directive to let Privoxy prefer either IPv4 (or IPv6)
250 addresses, instead of trusting the libc to return them in an order
251 that makes sense. Like #93, this could be useful as a workaround
252 for misconfigured setups.
254 95) Support a non-standard client header in CONNECT requests that
255 contains the URL of the requested resource, which is then treated
256 like the request URL.
258 This way the client could opt-in for path-based blocking of https
259 requests. Given that the headers from the CONNECT request aren't
260 forwarded to the destination server, an unencrypted URL should be
261 acceptable if the client and Privoxy are running on the same system
262 or in a trusted environment.
264 96) Filters should be easier to look up. Currently get_filter() has to
265 go through all filters and skip the filter types the caller isn't
268 98) When showing action section on the CGI pages, properly escape
269 line breaks so they can be copy&pasted into action files without
272 99) Figure out a mechanism through which a user can easily enable
273 site-specific action sections that are too aggressive to be
274 enabled by default. This could be similar to the presettings
275 in default.action, but could also be just another action file
276 that isn't used by default.
278 100) Create a cross-platform Privoxy control program and retire
279 the win32 GUI. Integrate support for Privoxy-Regression-Test,
280 Privoxy-Log-Parser, Privoxy-Filter-Test, uagen and similar tools.
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).
348 122) Allow customized log messages.
350 123) Evaluate if the voluntarily-disclose-session-keys option in Firefox
351 (and other browsers) can be leveraged. Probably depends on #16.
353 124) Add support for the "lightweight OS capability and sandbox framework"
354 Capsicum. http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/capsicum/
356 125) Allow clients to HTTPS-encrypt the proxy connection.