-$Id: TODO,v 1.9 2010/01/20 21:17:30 fabiankeil Exp $
+Some Privoxy-related tasks, sorted by the time they
+have been added, not by priority.
-Some Privoxy related task, not ordered in any way.
+The latest version should be available at:
+https://www.privoxy.org/gitweb/?p=privoxy.git;a=blob_plain;f=TODO;hb=HEAD
-1) Add some regression tests. Filters should be tested automatically
+There's work in progress to fund development on these items using
+donations. If you want to donate, please have a look at:
+https://www.privoxy.org/faq/general.html#DONATE
+
+1) Add more regression tests. Filters should be tested automatically
(variables too). Could probably reuse large parts of Privoxy-Filter-Test.
+ Note that there is currently work in progress to leverage curl's
+ test suite, patches have been submitted upstream:
+ http://curl.haxx.se/mail/lib-2014-06/0070.html
3) Fix some more XXX: comments.
-4) Fix some more compiler warnings. (Especially on amd64)
- Partly done.
-
6) Remove actions that aren't needed anymore:
content-type-overwrite should probably stay as it's also
11) CGI templates should use semantically-correct HTML
and scale properly.
-12) Add pipelining support.
-
-13) Use zlib to compress content before sending it to
- the client. Measure if it makes a difference.
-
-14) Log and filter POST parameters.
+ Work in progress.
-15) If trusted CGI pages are requested without trusted referrer,
- set the status code to 403 instead of 200.
+12) Support pipelining for outgoing connections.
-16) Filter SSL encrypted content as well.
-
- At the beginning we could use a unencrypted connection between
- client and Privoxy, and use an encrypted connection between
- Privoxy and the server.
-
- This should be good enough for most of the content the
- user would want to filter.
+14) Allow to filter POST parameters.
19) enable-forward-fallback. Syntax? Suggested by K.R.
32) In case of forwarding failures with socks port == 9050,
show extra info about Tor (the whole FAQ entry?).
-35) Do less work in the accept_connection() thread.
- Partly done. Good enough?
-
36) Unload unused action files directly, even if they are
disabled without replacement.
38) In the final results, explicitly list disabled multi actions
with their parameters. Not as trivial as it sounds.
-39) Verify loadcfg.c jarfile reloading and friends.
- /* XXX: Does disabling this actually work? */
-
-40) Fix core dumping in daemon mode.
+40) When running in daemon mode, Privoxy's working directory is '/'
+ which means it may not have permissions to dump core when necessary.
+ Figure out a way to solve this. Introduce a cwd config option?
41) Change documentation framework to one that works cross-platform.
- Evaluate WML.
+ Evaluate WML and txt2tags.
-42) Add DTrace hooks.
+42) Add a DTrace USDT provider. Now that FreeBSD has userland DTrace
+ support there's no longer any reason not to.
43) Write a tool to check URL patterns against URLs in the log file.
This could be included in Privoxy-Regression-Test.
44) Privoxy-Log-Parser: Consider highlighting "Connection" in:
23:13:03.506 283b6100 Header: Replaced: 'Connection: Keep-Alive' with 'Connection: close'
-49) Add FAQ for NTLM proxies. Still necessary?
-
50) Investigate possible PCRS template speedup when searching
macros with strstr() before compiling pcrs commands.
Investigated, needs some restructuring but is probably worth it.
-51) Make user-manual directive more generic to allow serving
- the FAQ and other stuff, too. Consider changing the port
- for "same origin policy" issues.
-
-53) Find a more reliable hoster.
+51) Make user-manual directive more generic to allow serving the FAQ
+ and files from user-specified directories. Consider changing the
+ port for "same origin policy" issues.
-54) Move away from CVS to a more modern revision control system.
+53) Find a more reliable hoster. Involves finding out what our
+ requirements are and which SF alternatives fulfil them.
+ It would probably also make sense to look into what other
+ projects did when migrating away from SF.
-55) Apply for Coverity scans: http://scan.coverity.com/
+ 2014-05: Work in progress. Hosting wish list at the end
+ of this file. Looks like most of the other projects
+ that left SF had lower standards and moved to hosters
+ that don't come close to sattisfying the requirements.
+ 2016-03: The website has been moved away from SF infrastructure
+ and is also available through https:// now.
+ 2016-04: Server rent for a year has been sponsored by ChameleonJohn.
+ 2016-04: The SF mailing lists have been deprecated, the new ones
+ are available at: https://lists.privoxy.org/
-56) Apply for the "free online access for qualified open-source
- software projects" for the Co-Advisor HTTP compliance tests:
- http://coad.measurement-factory.com/details.html#pricing
-
-57) Allow piping into external programs to allow more powerful
- filters and policy decisions.
+ Interested donors: 1.
58) Move more template strings from the code into the actual templates.
64) Use proper copyright attribution. "Privoxy Developers"
is no legal entity.
-65) Polish Website.
+65) Polish Website. Probably involves ditching the Docbook
+ mess. There are already several threads in the mailinglist
+ archives about this. See also #41.
-66) Increase maximum number of action and filter files.
+66) Stop hard-coding the number of action and filter files.
-67) Clean up directory layout. Depends on 54 so we don't
- lose the revision history.
+67) Clean up source code directory layout.
68) Use standard make syntax so we don't depend on GNU make.
69) Update autoconf setup (or move away from it).
+ Unfortunately the autoconf files can't be simply updated
+ due to license issues:
+ https://lists.privoxy.org/pipermail/privoxy-devel/2016-April/000008.html
70) If the server connection is reset but the headers are
received, consider passing the mess to the client instead
of showing the connect-failed template. Relates to #2698674.
-71) Allow to listen on multiple addresses without having to
- bind to all.
-
-73) Factor FEATURE_CONNECTION_SHARING out of
- FEATURE_CONNECTION_KEEP_ALIVE so the later can be enabled
- on platforms without mutex support as well.
-
74) Let Privoxy-Regression-Test optionally check that action
sections which disable actions actually are preceded by
sections that enable said actions.
+
+75) Create a tool that creates Privoxy action (and filter?) files
+ out of adblock files. Could be implemented as option for
+ url-pattern-translator.pl.
+
+76) Cache DNS responses. Note that this has been requested
+ several times by users, but is not a developer priority.
+ If you care about this, feel free to submit patches.
+
+77) Allow to configure the IP address used in outgoing connections.
+
+78) Allow to optionally use pcre's DFA algorithm.
+
+79) Evaluate pcre alternatives.
+
+82) Detect if the system time goes back in time let the user
+ know if it caused any connections to get closed.
+
+85) Once #51 is done, write a script that populates a directory with
+ various common third-party icons (stumbleupon.png, facebook.png ...)
+ and redirect requests for them to Privoxy.
+
+86) Add a server-body-tagger action. This is trivial as as all the
+ functionality required to do it already exists.
+
+87) Add a client-body-tagger action. This is less trivial as we currently
+ don't buffer client bodies. After 14) is implemented it would be
+ trivial, though.
+
+88) Investigate if there's a Perl module that Privoxy-Regression-Test
+ could optionally use to keep connections alive, preferably while
+ requiring less forks at the same time.
+
+89) When multiple block actions apply, consider showing all the block
+ reasons on the blocked page that haven't been overruled, not just
+ the last one.
+
+91) Add an optional limit for internal redirects. It would probably
+ be reasonable to default to a limit of one and showing an error
+ message if the request for the redirect URL would be redirected
+ again.
+
+92) The statistics currently aren't calculated correctly by Privoxy
+ as each thread is only counted as one request which is no longer
+ correct. This should be fixed, or the statistic code removed.
+ Privoxy-Log-Parser's provides more detailed statistics, anyway.
+
+93) Add a config directive to let Privoxy explicitly request either
+ IPv4 (or IPv6) addresses, even if the system supports both.
+ Could be useful as a workaround for misconfigured setups where the
+ libc returns IPv6 addresses even if there's no IPv6 connectivity.
+
+94) Add a config directive to let Privoxy prefer either IPv4 (or IPv6)
+ addresses, instead of trusting the libc to return them in an order
+ that makes sense. Like #93, this could be useful as a workaround
+ for misconfigured setups.
+
+96) Filters should be easier to look up. Currently get_filter() has to
+ go through all filters and skip the filter types the caller isn't
+ interested in.
+
+98) When showing action sections on the CGI pages, properly escape
+ line breaks so they can be copy&pasted into action files without
+ adjustments.
+
+99) Figure out a mechanism through which a user can easily enable
+ site-specific action sections that are too aggressive to be
+ enabled by default. This could be similar to the presettings
+ in default.action, but could also be just another action file
+ that isn't used by default.
+
+100) Create a cross-platform Privoxy control program and retire
+ the win32 GUI. Integrate support for Privoxy-Regression-Test,
+ Privoxy-Log-Parser, Privoxy-Filter-Test, uagen and similar tools.
+ Interested donors: 1.
+
+102) Add an include directive to split the config file into several parts.
+
+103) Potential performance improvement for large action files:
+ when figuring out which actions apply, check the action bit mask
+ before pattern matching and skip section that wouldn't modify the
+ actions already set. To increase the impact the sections would have
+ to be applied in reverse.
+
+104) The code to modify global_toggle_state should be factored out into
+ a separate function. Currently we mess with it in three different
+ files, but only in w32log.c the tray icon is explicitly set.
+ The logging is inconsistent as well. For details see #3525694.
+
+106) actionlist.h should be embedded in a way that causes less text
+ segment bloat.
+
+107) Support more pcrs variables, for example $destination-ip-address
+ and $source-ip-address.
+
+108) Allow to use a somewhat random string instead of PRIVOXY-FORCE.
+
+109) Let log_error() support the format specifier %S which should
+ work like %s but escape new lines like %N. This would be useful
+ to log the result of header filters which may inject new lines.
+
+110) Add a global-buffer-limit directive that roughly limits how
+ much malloc'ed memory Privoxy will use and can potentially
+ be smaller than (buffer-limit * max-client-connections).
+
+111) Reject requests if hosts and ports in request line and Host
+ header don't match (before filters have been applied).
+
+112) If a header filter is used to inject another header by inserting
+ a \r\n (undocumented feature), detect it and split the headers so
+ following header actions do not treat them as a single string.
+ Alternatively add another header injection mechanism.
+
+113) Log statistics upon receiving a certain signal (SIGINFO or SIGUSR1).
+
+114) Properly deal with status code 100. The current "Continue hack"
+ can cause problems for gpg when uploading keys through Privoxy.
+
+115) Add ICAP (RFC 3507) support. FR #3615158.
+
+116) Due to the use of sscanf(), Privoxy currently will fail to properly
+ parse chunks whose size can't be represented with 32 bit. This is
+ unlikely to cause problems in the real world, but should eventually
+ be fixed anyway. See also:
+ https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=959100
+
+118) There should be "escaped" dynamic variables that are guaranteed
+ not to break filters.
+
+119) Evaluate using pcre's jit mode.
+
+120) Add an option to limit pcre's recursion limit below the default.
+ On some platforms the recursion limit doesn't prevent pcre from
+ running out of stack space, causing the kernel to kill Privoxy
+ ungracefully.
+
+121) Add HTTP/2 support. As a first step, incoming HTTP/1.x requests
+ should be translated to outgoing HTTP/2 requests where possible
+ (and if desired by the user).
+ Interested donors: 1.
+
+122) Allow customized log messages.
+
+124) Add support for the "lightweight OS capability and sandbox framework"
+ Capsicum. http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/capsicum/
+ Interested donors: 1.
+
+125) Allow clients to HTTPS-encrypt the proxy connection.
+ Interested donors: 1.
+
+126) Run the Co-Advisor HTTP compliance tests, evaluate the results,
+ fix the compliance issues that aren't by design and document
+ the rest.
+ Note that Privoxy developers qualify for free account upgrades:
+ http://coad.measurement-factory.com/details.html#pricing
+
+127) Add "real" CGI support (serve program output instead of forwarding
+ the request). The work is mostly done due to +external-filter{}.
+
+128) Add a config directive to control the stack limit.
+
+129) Completely implement RFC 7230 4.1 (Chunked Transfer Coding).
+ Currently Privoxy doesn't properly deal with trailers which
+ are rarely used in the real world but should be supported anyway.
+
+130) Move header_tagger() out of the parser structs and let it execute
+ taggers one-by-one against all headers so the header order has less
+ influence on the tagging result. As a bonus, dynamic taggers would
+ have to be compiled less often.
+
+131) The handle-as-empty-doc-returns-ok directive should be replaced with
+ an action so the behaviour can be enabled on a per-request basis.
+ Interested donors: 1.
+
+133) Consider allowing bitcoin donations.
+ Interested donors: 2.
+
+134) Track the total number of bytes written to and received from a socket.
+
+135) Add OpenBSM audit support.
+
+136) Make builds reproducible.
+
+137) Add a (preferably vector-based) logo.
+
+138) Bring back the scripts to provide actions file feedback.
+
+ Once upon a time (~2003) there were scripts on the webserver
+ to make reporting action file feedback more convenient for the
+ user and the actual reports more useful for the developers.
+ They have been unusable for years and have thus been disabled,
+ but making the reporting mechanism available again would be a
+ good idea.
+
+140) Toggling Privoxy off currently also disables stuff that
+ probably shouldn't be affected (such as actions like
+ forward-override). Investigate and fix or document.
+
+141) Port Privoxy to CloudABI, which, despite the name, is actually
+ rather neat. https://github.com/NuxiNL/cloudlibc
+
+142) Remove or update the "internal" pcre version.
+
+143) Add support for OpenBSD's pledge feature once it's stablelized.
+ This should be a lot less work then #124.
+
+146) Allow to save the internal client tag state to disk and
+ load it after restarts.
+
+147) Improve "Building from Source" section in the user manual.
+ A common problem seems to be that it's not obvious to non-technical
+ users how the listed dependencies can be installed on the commonly
+ used platforms. Adding a couple of examples should also be useful for
+ technical users (like Privoxy developers) who want to install or test
+ Privoxy on platforms they are not familiar with.
+
+148) Add a config directive to change the CGI_SITE_2_HOST
+ (default: config.privoxy.org).
+
+ If Privoxy is used as reverse proxy or intercepting proxy without
+ getting intercepted requests, error pages created from default templates
+ currently can result in client requests to config.privoxy.org on the
+ Internet which may not be desirable.
+
+150) Add blacklistd support.
+
+151) Let the dok-tidy target work cross-platform without introducing
+ a ton of white-space changes that hide the content changes.
+
+152) Fix CSS references in the website documentation.
+ For many pages p_doc.css is specified twice using different paths.
+ Usually at least one works, but not all of them do and the
+ duplicated requests are pointless even if they don't end up with
+ a 404.
+
+153) Catch SIGINT and use it to close the listen socket, serve
+ remaining connections and shut down. This would allow higher
+ uptime and make testing more convenient.
+
+154) Underline links in docs and cgi pages. More precisely,
+ don't mess with the browser defaults for link underlining.
+
+155) The sig_handler() shouldn't call log_error().
+ While it isn't known to cause actual problems in normal operation,
+ it's technically incorrect and causes crashes when running in
+ valgrind.
+
+156) Reject socks requests with an explicit error message similar
+ to the one used for ftp. Motivation:
+ https://lists.privoxy.org/pipermail/privoxy-users/2017-March/000195.html
+
+158) Use a single thread to wait for new requests on reused client connections.
+ Currently the thread that handles the first request on a connection
+ stays responsible for the client connect until it gets closed.
+ In case of lots of idle connections lots of waiting threads are used.
+ While it's conceivable that this ineffiency is irrelevant from a
+ performance point of view, using a single thread should reduce Privoxy's
+ memory footprint a bit which may be noticeable in case of multi-user setups
+ with hundreds of idle connections.
+
+161) Properly support requests with chunked transfer-encoding with https inspection.
+
+162) When https inspecting, delete generated keys and certificates if
+ the connection to the destination could not be established.
+ Makes silly DoS attacks slightly more complicated.
+
+163) Use subdirectories in the certificate-directory to lower the number
+ of files per directory.
+
+164) Evaluate switching from pcreposix(3) to pcre's native api
+ for URL matching which allows to compile the patterns once
+ at load-time.
+
+##########################################################################
+
+Hosting wish list (relevant for #53)
+
+What we need:
+
+- Bug tracker
+- Mailinglists (Mailman with public archives preferred)
+- Webspace (on a Unix-like OS that works with the webserver targets
+ in GNUMakefile)
+- Git repositories
+- Commit mails (preferably with unified diffs)
+
+(Unsorted) details to look at when evaluating hosters:
+
+1. Preferably no third-party ads and trackers.
+ External images, CSS and JavaScript may count as trackers
+ but texts like "supported by company XYZ" may be acceptable.
+
+2. JavaScript should be optional or not used at all.
+
+3. Services we don't need shouldn't be enabled anyway.
+ (We currently don't use Web forums, wikis, surveys etc.)
+
+4. It would be preferable if the hoster didn't have a bad track
+ record as far as user experience, security and privacy are
+ concerned and if the terms of service are "reasonable" and
+ haven't changed too often in the past. Updates in the past
+ should have been improvements and not regressions.
+
+5. It would be preferable if most of the server administration
+ is done by a trusted third-party (or at least not a lot of work
+ for us).
+
+6. The server(s) should be located in a country with laws we can
+ understand and follow (or at least not unintentionally violate).
+
+7. A server location in a country with some kind of due process
+ and strong data protection laws (at least on paper) would be
+ preferable.
+
+8. Given that Privoxy is a free software project it would be
+ preferable if the hoster would use free software where possible.
+
+9. Migrating away from the hoster in the future without losing
+ any important data should be possible without writing web
+ scrapers first.
projects / privoxy.git / blobdiff