1 $Id: TODO,v 1.52 2011/08/17 10:23:42 fabiankeil Exp $
3 Some Privoxy related tasks, sorted by the time they
4 have been added, not by priority.
6 1) Add some regression tests. Filters should be tested automatically
7 (variables too). Could probably reuse large parts of Privoxy-Filter-Test.
9 3) Fix some more XXX: comments.
11 4) Fix some more compiler warnings. (Especially on amd64)
14 6) Remove actions that aren't needed anymore:
16 content-type-overwrite should probably stay as it's also
17 used by some of the CGI pages (XXX: name them).
19 crunch-client-header and crunch-server-header should probably
20 go, their only advantage is that their search strings can be
21 controlled through the CGI pages, other than that they only
24 crunch-if-none-match can be replaced with a header filter.
26 prevent-compression has a misleading name and could
27 be replaced with a header filter.
29 7) force-text-mode has a stupid name and should probably
30 be renamed to force-filter-mode.
32 8) handle-as-empty-document and handle-as-image should
33 be merged to something like handle-as{something} to
34 prevent them from being activated at the same time.
36 10) There's a bug in the CGI editor that turns the
37 first section's "Insert new section below" into
38 a "Insert new section above" button.
40 11) CGI templates should use semantically-correct HTML
43 12) Add pipelining support.
45 14) Allow to filter POST parameters.
47 15) If trusted CGI pages are requested without trusted referrer,
48 set the status code to 403 instead of 200.
50 16) Filter SSL encrypted content as well.
52 At the beginning we could use a unencrypted connection between
53 client and Privoxy, and use an encrypted connection between
54 Privoxy and the server.
56 This should be good enough for most of the content the
57 user would want to filter.
59 19) enable-forward-fallback. Syntax? Suggested by K.R.
61 21) User Manual delivery doesn't accept multiple slashes. Should it?
63 22) Verify action files properly (Including arguments) and
64 act accordingly (should probably intercept all requests
65 with a "Invalid option foo detected" CGI page).
67 23) Do the same in case of syntax errors in the configuration file,
68 instead of just exiting or ignoring the problem.
70 25) Handle multiple filters with the same name better. Reject them?
72 26) Let show-url-info detect clearly invalid URLs.
74 27) Make errno logging less thread-unsafe.
75 Verify that it's really an improvement.
77 28) Don't take default ports in case of invalid forwarding ports.
79 31) If a string action foo is disabled csp->action->string[ACTION_STRING_FOO]
80 doesn't necessarily contain NULL, but may contain the string of an
81 enabled foo action in an overruled section. Is it a bug? Does it matter?
83 32) In case of forwarding failures with socks port == 9050,
84 show extra info about Tor (the whole FAQ entry?).
86 36) Unload unused action files directly, even if they are
87 disabled without replacement.
89 38) In the final results, explicitly list disabled multi actions
90 with their parameters. Not as trivial as it sounds.
92 40) When running in daemon mode, Privoxy's working directory is '/'
93 which means it may not have permissions to dump core when necessary.
94 Figure out a way to solve this. Introduce a cwd config option?
96 41) Change documentation framework to one that works cross-platform.
99 42) Add a DTrace USDT provider. Now that FreeBSD has userland DTrace
100 support there's no longer any reason not to.
102 43) Write a tool to check URL patterns against URLs in the log file.
103 This could be included in Privoxy-Regression-Test.
105 44) Privoxy-Log-Parser: Consider highlighting "Connection" in:
106 23:13:03.506 283b6100 Header: Replaced: 'Connection: Keep-Alive' with 'Connection: close'
108 49) Add FAQ for NTLM proxies. Still necessary?
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 pretents
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
134 57) Allow piping into external programs to allow more powerful
135 filters and policy decisions. Incomplete support available
136 in Fabian's popen branch.
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 should be already some threads
156 in the mailinglists archives about this. See also #41.
158 66) Increase maximum 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 83) Make the FAQ available through the CGI interface like the
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.