1 $Id: TODO,v 1.153 2017/01/10 12:13:19 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.
108 Evaluate WML and txt2tags.
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: Work in progress. Hosting wish list at the end
133 of this file. Looks like most of the other projects
134 that left SF had lower standards and moved to hosters
135 that don't come close to sattisfying the requirements.
136 2016-03: The website has been moved away from SF infrastructure
137 and is also available through https:// now.
138 2016-04: Server rent for a year has been sponsored by ChameleonJohn.
139 2016-04: The SF mailing lists have been deprecated, the new ones
140 are available at: https://lists.privoxy.org/
142 Interested donors: 1.
144 54) Move away from CVS to a more modern revision control system.
145 The move to git is work in progress:
146 https://sourceforge.net/p/ijbswa/mailman/message/34994343/
148 58) Move more template strings from the code into the actual templates.
150 59) Import the German template translation.
152 60) Ask the Russian translators for input on how to make their
155 61) Consider (optionally?) skipping the hostname comparison when
156 checking if a connections that goes to a HTTP proxy can be reused.
157 Do all HTTP proxy support that? Is it worth it?
159 63) Reject clearly too large requests earlier?
161 64) Use proper copyright attribution. "Privoxy Developers"
164 65) Polish Website. Probably involves ditching the Docbook
165 mess. There are already several threads in the mailinglist
166 archives about this. See also #41.
168 66) Stop hard-coding the number of action and filter files.
170 67) Clean up source code directory layout. Depends on 54 so
171 we don't lose the revision history.
173 68) Use standard make syntax so we don't depend on GNU make.
175 69) Update autoconf setup (or move away from it).
176 Unfortunately the autoconf files can't be simply updated
177 due to license issues:
178 https://lists.privoxy.org/pipermail/privoxy-devel/2016-April/000008.html
180 70) If the server connection is reset but the headers are
181 received, consider passing the mess to the client instead
182 of showing the connect-failed template. Relates to #2698674.
184 74) Let Privoxy-Regression-Test optionally check that action
185 sections which disable actions actually are preceded by
186 sections that enable said actions.
188 75) Create a tool that creates Privoxy action (and filter?) files
189 out of adblock files. Could be implemented as option for
190 url-pattern-translator.pl.
192 76) Cache DNS responses. Note that this has been requested
193 several times by users, but is not a developer priority.
194 If you care about this, feel free to submit patches.
196 77) Allow to configure the IP address used in outgoing connections.
198 78) Allow to optionally use pcre's DFA algorithm.
200 79) Evaluate pcre alternatives.
202 80) Change FEATURE_EXTENDED_HOST_PATTERNS to support both
203 extended and vanilla host patterns at the same time.
205 Note that the requirement is to allow the user to decide
206 if the domain pattern should be interpreted as regex or
207 traditional host pattern and if it's not obvious that the
208 user made any decision, default to the latter.
210 Possible solutions would be:
212 1. An always-use-regex-domain-patterns config option
213 2. An enable-regex-domain-patterns-for-this-action-file option
214 3. An enable-regex-domain-patterns-for-this-action-file-until-the-user-says-otherwise option
215 4. A treat-the-domain-pattern-in-this-line-as-regex(-or-not) option
216 5. Combinations of the options above
218 With 2+4, 3+4 or 2+3+4 being the preferences until
221 82) Detect if the system time goes back in time let the user
222 know if it caused any connections to get closed.
224 85) Once #84 is done, write a script that populates a directory with
225 various common third-party icons (stumbleupon.png, facebook.png ...)
226 and redirect requests for them to Privoxy.
228 86) Add a server-body-tagger action. This is trivial as as all the
229 functionality required to do it already exists.
231 87) Add a client-body-tagger action. This is less trivial as we currently
232 don't buffer client bodies. After 14) is implemented it would be
235 88) Investigate if there's a Perl module that Privoxy-Regression-Test
236 could optionally use to keep connections alive, preferably while
237 requiring less forks at the same time.
239 89) When multiple block actions apply, consider showing all the block
240 reasons on the blocked page that haven't been overruled, not just
243 91) Add an optional limit for internal redirects. It would probably
244 be reasonable to default to a limit of one and showing an error
245 message if the request for the redirect URL would be redirected
248 92) The statistics currently aren't calculated correctly by Privoxy
249 as each thread is only counted as one request which is no longer
250 correct. This should be fixed, or the statistic code removed.
251 Privoxy-Log-Parser's provides more detailed statistics, anyway.
253 93) Add a config directive to let Privoxy explicitly request either
254 IPv4 (or IPv6) addresses, even if the system supports both.
255 Could be useful as a workaround for misconfigured setups where the
256 libc returns IPv6 addresses even if there's no IPv6 connectivity.
258 94) Add a config directive to let Privoxy prefer either IPv4 (or IPv6)
259 addresses, instead of trusting the libc to return them in an order
260 that makes sense. Like #93, this could be useful as a workaround
261 for misconfigured setups.
263 95) Support a non-standard client header in CONNECT requests that
264 contains the URL of the requested resource, which is then treated
265 like the request URL.
267 This way the client could opt-in for path-based blocking of https
268 requests. Given that the headers from the CONNECT request aren't
269 forwarded to the destination server, an unencrypted URL should be
270 acceptable if the client and Privoxy are running on the same system
271 or in a trusted environment.
273 96) Filters should be easier to look up. Currently get_filter() has to
274 go through all filters and skip the filter types the caller isn't
277 98) When showing action section on the CGI pages, properly escape
278 line breaks so they can be copy&pasted into action files without
281 99) Figure out a mechanism through which a user can easily enable
282 site-specific action sections that are too aggressive to be
283 enabled by default. This could be similar to the presettings
284 in default.action, but could also be just another action file
285 that isn't used by default.
287 100) Create a cross-platform Privoxy control program and retire
288 the win32 GUI. Integrate support for Privoxy-Regression-Test,
289 Privoxy-Log-Parser, Privoxy-Filter-Test, uagen and similar tools.
290 Interested donors: 1.
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 bit mask
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 instead of PRIVOXY-FORCE.
315 109) Let log_error() support the format specifier %S which should
316 work like %s but escape new lines like %N. This would be useful
317 to log the result of header filters which may inject new lines.
319 110) Add a global-buffer-limit directive that roughly limits how
320 much malloc'ed memory Privoxy will use and can potentially
321 be smaller than (buffer-limit * max-client-connections).
323 111) Reject requests if hosts and ports in request line and Host
324 header don't match (before filters have been applied).
326 112) If a header filter is used to inject another header by inserting
327 a \r\n (undocumented feature), detect it and split the headers so
328 following header actions do not treat them as a single string.
329 Alternatively add another header injection mechanism.
331 113) Log statistics upon receiving a certain signal (SIGINFO or SIGUSR1).
333 114) Properly deal with status code 100. The current "Continue hack"
334 can cause problems for gpg when uploading keys through Privoxy.
336 115) Add ICAP (RFC 3507) support. FR #3615158.
338 116) Due to the use of sscanf(), Privoxy currently will fail to properly
339 parse chunks whose size can't be represented with 32 bit. This is
340 unlikely to cause problems in the real world, but should eventually
341 be fixed anyway. See also:
342 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=959100
344 118) There should be "escaped" dynamic variables that are guaranteed
345 not to break filters.
347 119) Evaluate using pcre's jit mode.
349 120) Add an option to limit pcre's recursion limit below the default.
350 On some platforms the recursion limit doesn't prevent pcre from
351 running out of stack space, causing the kernel to kill Privoxy
354 121) Add HTTP/2 support. As a first step, incomming HTTP/1.x requests
355 should be translated to outgoing HTTP/2 requests where possible
356 (and if desired by the user).
357 Interested donors: 1.
359 122) Allow customized log messages.
361 123) Evaluate if the voluntarily-disclose-session-keys option in Firefox
362 (and other browsers) can be leveraged. Probably depends on #16.
364 124) Add support for the "lightweight OS capability and sandbox framework"
365 Capsicum. http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/capsicum/
366 Interested donors: 1.
368 125) Allow clients to HTTPS-encrypt the proxy connection.
369 Interested donors: 1.
371 126) Run the Co-Advisor HTTP compliance tests, evaluate the results,
372 fix the compliance issues that aren't by design and document
374 Note that Privoxy developers qualify for free account upgrades:
375 http://coad.measurement-factory.com/details.html#pricing
377 127) Add "real" CGI support (serve program output instead of forwarding
378 the request). The work is mostly done due to +external-filter{}.
380 128) Add a config directive to control the stack limit.
382 129) Completely implement RFC 7230 4.1 (Chunked Transfer Coding).
383 Currently Privoxy doesn't properly deal with trailers which
384 are rarely used in the real world but should be supported anyway.
386 130) Move header_tagger() out of the parser structs and let it execute
387 taggers one-by-one against all headers so the header order has less
388 influence on the tagging result. As a bonus, dynamic taggers would
389 have to be compiled less often.
391 131) The handle-as-empty-doc-returns-ok directive should be replaced with
392 an action so the behaviour can be enabled on a per-request basis.
393 Interested donors: 1.
395 133) Consider allowing bitcoin donations.
396 Interested donors: 2.
398 134) Track the total number of bytes written to and received from a socket.
400 135) Add OpenBSM audit support.
402 136) Make builds reproducible.
404 137) Add a (preferably vector-based) logo.
406 138) Bring back the scripts to provide actions file feedback.
408 Once upon a time (~2003) there were scripts on the webserver
409 to make reporting action file feedback more convenient for the
410 user and the actual reports more useful for the developers.
411 They have been unusable for years and have thus been disabled,
412 but making the reporting mechanism available again would be a
415 140) Toggling Privoxy off currently also disables stuff that
416 probably shouldn't be affected (such as actions like
417 forward-override). Investigate and fix or document.
419 141) Port Privoxy to CloudABI, which, despite the name, is actually
420 rather neet. https://github.com/NuxiNL/cloudlibc
422 142) Remove or update the "internal" pcre version.
424 143) Add support for OpenBSD's pledge feature once it's stablelized.
425 This should be a lot less work then #124.
427 146) Allow to save the internal client tag state to disk and
428 load it after restarts.
430 147) Improve "Building from Source" section in the user manual.
431 A common problem seems to be that it's not obvious to non-technical
432 users how the listed dependencies can be installed on the commonly
433 used platforms. Adding a couple of examples should also be useful for
434 technical users (like Privoxy developers) who want to install or test
435 Privoxy on platforms they are not familiar with.
437 148) Add a config directive to change the CGI_SITE_2_HOST
438 (default: config.privoxy.org).
440 If Privoxy is used as reverse proxy or intercepting proxy without
441 getting intercepted requests, error pages created from default templates
442 currently can result in client requests to config.privoxy.org on the
443 Internet which may not be desirable.
445 149) Use poll() for socket selection so the number of sockets Privoxy
446 can deal with isn't limited to FD_SETSIZE anymore.
448 150) Add blacklistd support.
450 151) Let the dok-tidy target work cross-platform without introducing
451 a ton of white-space changes that hide the content changes.
453 ##########################################################################
455 Hosting wish list (relevant for #53)
460 - Mailinglists (Mailman with public archives preferred)
461 - Webspace (on a Unix-like OS that works with the webserver targets
463 - Source code repositories (currently CVS, but migrating away
464 from it is TODO #54 anyway and shouldn't be too much trouble)
465 - Commit mails (preferably with unified diffs)
467 (Unsorted) details to look at when evaluating hosters:
469 1. Preferably no third-party ads and trackers.
470 External images, CSS and JavaScript may count as trackers
471 but texts like "supported by company XYZ" may be acceptable.
473 2. JavaScript should be optional or not used at all.
475 3. Services we don't need shouldn't be enabled anyway.
476 (We currently don't use Web forums, wikis, surveys etc.)
478 4. It would be preferable if the hoster didn't have a bad track
479 record as far as user experience, security and privacy are
480 concerned and if the terms of service are "reasonable" and
481 haven't changed too often in the past. Updates in the past
482 should have been improvements and not regressions.
484 5. It would be preferable if most of the server administration
485 is done by a trusted third-party (or at least not a lot of work
488 6. The server(s) should be located in a country with laws we can
489 understand and follow (or at least not unintentionally violate).
491 7. A server location in a country with some kind of due process
492 and strong data protection laws (at least on paper) would be
495 8. Given that Privoxy is a free software project it would be
496 preferable if the hoster would use free software where possible.
498 9. Migrating away from the hoster in the future without losing
499 any important data should be possible without writing web