1 $Id: TODO,v 1.127 2014/10/21 15:31:32 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
50 12) Support pipelining for outgoing connections.
52 14) Allow to filter POST parameters.
54 15) If trusted CGI pages are requested without trusted referrer,
55 set the status code to 403 instead of 200.
57 16) Filter SSL encrypted content as well.
59 At the beginning we could use a unencrypted connection between
60 client and Privoxy, and use an encrypted connection between
61 Privoxy and the server.
63 This should be good enough for most of the content the
64 user would want to filter.
66 19) enable-forward-fallback. Syntax? Suggested by K.R.
68 21) User Manual delivery doesn't accept multiple slashes. Should it?
70 22) Verify action files properly (Including arguments) and
71 act accordingly (should probably intercept all requests
72 with a "Invalid option foo detected" CGI page).
74 23) Do the same in case of syntax errors in the configuration file,
75 instead of just exiting or ignoring the problem.
77 25) Handle multiple filters with the same name better. Reject them?
79 26) Let show-url-info detect clearly invalid URLs.
81 27) Make errno logging less thread-unsafe.
82 Verify that it's really an improvement.
84 28) Don't take default ports in case of invalid forwarding ports.
86 31) If a string action foo is disabled csp->action->string[ACTION_STRING_FOO]
87 doesn't necessarily contain NULL, but may contain the string of an
88 enabled foo action in an overruled section. Is it a bug? Does it matter?
90 32) In case of forwarding failures with socks port == 9050,
91 show extra info about Tor (the whole FAQ entry?).
93 36) Unload unused action files directly, even if they are
94 disabled without replacement.
96 38) In the final results, explicitly list disabled multi actions
97 with their parameters. Not as trivial as it sounds.
99 40) When running in daemon mode, Privoxy's working directory is '/'
100 which means it may not have permissions to dump core when necessary.
101 Figure out a way to solve this. Introduce a cwd config option?
103 41) Change documentation framework to one that works cross-platform.
106 42) Add a DTrace USDT provider. Now that FreeBSD has userland DTrace
107 support there's no longer any reason not to.
109 43) Write a tool to check URL patterns against URLs in the log file.
110 This could be included in Privoxy-Regression-Test.
112 44) Privoxy-Log-Parser: Consider highlighting "Connection" in:
113 23:13:03.506 283b6100 Header: Replaced: 'Connection: Keep-Alive' with 'Connection: close'
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 2014-05-13: Work in progress. Hosting wish list at the end
131 Interested donors: 1.
133 54) Move away from CVS to a more modern revision control system.
134 Find out if there are any objection against going with Git.
135 Using Git would also have the advantage that SF now pretends
136 to support it, so we could do it independently from 53).
138 58) Move more template strings from the code into the actual templates.
140 59) Import the German template translation.
142 60) Ask the Russian translators for input on how to make their
145 61) Consider (optionally?) skipping the hostname comparison when
146 checking if a connections that goes to a HTTP proxy can be reused.
147 Do all HTTP proxy support that? Is it worth it?
149 63) Reject clearly too large requests earlier?
151 64) Use proper copyright attribution. "Privoxy Developers"
154 65) Polish Website. Probably involves ditching the Docbook
155 mess in favour of wml. There are already several threads
156 in the mailinglist archives about this. See also #41.
158 66) Stop hard-coding the number of action and filter files.
160 67) Clean up source code directory layout. Depends on 54 so
161 we don't lose the revision history.
163 68) Use standard make syntax so we don't depend on GNU make.
165 69) Update autoconf setup (or move away from it).
167 70) If the server connection is reset but the headers are
168 received, consider passing the mess to the client instead
169 of showing the connect-failed template. Relates to #2698674.
171 74) Let Privoxy-Regression-Test optionally check that action
172 sections which disable actions actually are preceded by
173 sections that enable said actions.
175 75) Create a tool that creates Privoxy action (and filter?) files
176 out of adblock files. Could be implemented as option for
177 url-pattern-translator.pl.
179 76) Cache DNS responses. Note that this has been requested
180 several times by users, but is not a developer priority.
181 If you care about this, feel free to submit patches.
183 77) Allow to configure the IP address used in outgoing connections.
185 78) Allow to optionally use pcre's DFA algorithm.
187 79) Evaluate pcre alternatives.
189 80) Change FEATURE_EXTENDED_HOST_PATTERNS to support both
190 extended and vanilla host patterns at the same time.
192 Note that the requirement is to allow the user to decide
193 if the domain pattern should be interpreted as regex or
194 traditional host pattern and if it's not obvious that the
195 user made any decision, default to the latter.
197 Possible solutions would be:
199 1. An always-use-regex-domain-patterns config option
200 2. An enable-regex-domain-patterns-for-this-action-file option
201 3. An enable-regex-domain-patterns-for-this-action-file-until-the-user-says-otherwise option
202 4. A treat-the-domain-pattern-in-this-line-as-regex(-or-not) option
203 5. Combinations of the options above
205 With 2+4, 3+4 or 2+3+4 being the preferences until
208 82) Detect if the system time goes back in time let the user
209 know if it caused any connections to get closed.
211 84) Flesh out the user-manual delivery to serve pages from
212 other directories, too.
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.
281 102) Add an include directive to split the config file into several parts.
283 103) Potential performance improvement for large action files:
284 when figuring out which actions apply, check the action bit mask
285 before pattern matching and skip section that wouldn't modify the
286 actions already set. To increase the impact the sections would have
287 to be applied in reverse.
289 104) The code to modify global_toggle_state should be factored out into
290 a separate function. Currently we mess with it in three different
291 files, but only in w32log.c the tray icon is explicitly set.
292 The logging is inconsistent as well. For details see #3525694.
294 105) Add support for socks authentication.
296 106) actionlist.h should be embedded in a way that causes less text
299 107) Support more pcrs variables, for example $destination-ip-address
300 and $source-ip-address.
302 108) Allow to use a somewhat random string instead of PRIVOXY-FORCE.
304 109) Let log_error() support the format specifier %S which should
305 work like %s but escape new lines like %N. This would be useful
306 to log the result of header filters which may inject new lines.
308 110) Add a global-buffer-limit directive that roughly limits how
309 much malloc'ed memory Privoxy will use and can potentially
310 be smaller than (buffer-limit * max-client-connections).
312 111) Reject requests if hosts and ports in request line and Host
313 header don't match (before filters have been applied).
315 112) If a header filter is used to inject another header by inserting
316 a \r\n (undocumented feature), detect it and split the headers so
317 following header actions do not treat them as a single string.
318 Alternatively add another header injection mechanism.
320 113) Log statistics upon receiving a certain signal (SIGINFO or SIGUSR1).
322 114) Properly deal with status code 100. The current "Continue hack"
323 can cause problems for gpg when uploading keys through Privoxy.
325 115) Add ICAP (RFC 3507) support. FR #3615158.
327 116) Due to the use of sscanf(), Privoxy currently will fail to properly
328 parse chunks whose size can't be represented with 32 bit. This is
329 unlikely to cause problems in the real world, but should eventually
330 be fixed anyway. See also:
331 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=959100
333 118) There should be "escaped" dynamic variables that are guaranteed
334 not to break filters.
336 119) Evaluate using pcre's jit mode.
338 120) Add an option to limit pcre's recursion limit below the default.
339 On some platforms the recursion limit doesn't prevent pcre from
340 running out of stack space, causing the kernel to kill Privoxy
343 121) Add HTTP/2 support. As a first step, incomming HTTP/1.x requests
344 should be translated to outgoing HTTP/2 requests where possible
345 (and if desired by the user).
347 122) Allow customized log messages.
349 123) Evaluate if the voluntarily-disclose-session-keys option in Firefox
350 (and other browsers) can be leveraged. Probably depends on #16.
352 124) Add support for the "lightweight OS capability and sandbox framework"
353 Capsicum. http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/capsicum/
354 Interested donors: 1.
356 125) Allow clients to HTTPS-encrypt the proxy connection.
357 Interested donors: 1.
359 126) Run the Co-Advisor HTTP compliance tests, evaluate the results,
360 fix the compliance issues that aren't by design and document
362 Note that Privoxy developers qualified for free account upgrades:
363 http://coad.measurement-factory.com/details.html#pricing
365 127) Add "real" CGI support (serve program output instead of forwarding
366 the request). The work is mostly done due to +external-filter{}.
368 128) Add a config directive to control the stack limit.
370 129) Completely implement RFC 7230 4.1 (Chunked Transfer Coding).
371 Currently Privoxy doesn't properly deal with trailers which
372 are rarely used in the real world but should be supported anyway.
374 130) Move header_tagger() out of the parser structs and let it execute
375 taggers one-by-one against all headers so the header order has less
376 influence on the tagging result. As a bonus, dynamic taggers would
377 have to be compiled less often.
379 131) The handle-as-empty-doc-returns-ok directive should be replaced with
380 an action so the behaviour can be enabled on a per-request basis.
381 Interested donors: 1.
383 132) Provide a Tor hidden service to reach the Privoxy website.
384 Interested donors: 1.
386 133) Consider allowing bitcoin donations.
387 Interested donors: 1.
389 134) Track the total number of bytes written to and received from a socket.
391 135) Add OpenBSM audit support.
393 136) Make builds reproducible.
395 137) Add a (preferably vector-based) logo.
397 138) Bring back the scripts to provide actions file feedback.
399 Once upon a time (~2003) there were scripts on the webserver
400 to make reporting action file feedback more convenient for the
401 user and the actual reports more useful for the developers.
402 They have been unusable for years and have thus been disabled,
403 but making the reporting mechanism available again would be a
406 ##########################################################################
408 Hosting wish list (relevant for #53)
413 - Mailinglists (Mailman with public archives preferred)
414 - Webspace (on a Unix-like OS that works with the webserver targets
416 - Source code repositories (currently CVS, but migrating away
417 from it is TODO #54 anyway and shouldn't be too much trouble)
418 - Commit mails (preferably with unified diffs)
420 (Unsorted) details to look at when evaluating hosters:
422 1. Preferably no third-party ads and trackers.
423 External images, CSS and JavaScript may count as trackers
424 but texts like "supported by company XYZ" may be acceptable.
426 2. JavaScript should be optional or not used at all.
428 3. Services we don't need shouldn't be enabled anyway.
429 (We currently don't use Web forums, wikis, surveys etc.)
431 4. It would be preferable if the hoster didn't have a bad track
432 record as far as user experience, security and privacy are
433 concerned and if the terms of service are "reasonable" and
434 haven't changed too often in the past. Updates in the past
435 should have been improvements and not regressions.
437 5. It would be preferable if most of the server administration
438 is done by a trusted third-party (or at least not a lot of work
441 6. The server(s) should be located in a country with laws we can
442 understand and follow (or at least not unintentionally violate).
444 7. A server location in a country with some kind of due process
445 and strong data protection laws (at least on paper) would be
448 8. Given that Privoxy is a free software project it would be
449 preferable if the hoster would use free software where possible.
451 9. Migrating away from the hoster in the future without losing
452 any important data should be possible without writing web