1 $Id: TODO,v 1.152 2016/08/26 12:27:18 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).
177 70) If the server connection is reset but the headers are
178 received, consider passing the mess to the client instead
179 of showing the connect-failed template. Relates to #2698674.
181 74) Let Privoxy-Regression-Test optionally check that action
182 sections which disable actions actually are preceded by
183 sections that enable said actions.
185 75) Create a tool that creates Privoxy action (and filter?) files
186 out of adblock files. Could be implemented as option for
187 url-pattern-translator.pl.
189 76) Cache DNS responses. Note that this has been requested
190 several times by users, but is not a developer priority.
191 If you care about this, feel free to submit patches.
193 77) Allow to configure the IP address used in outgoing connections.
195 78) Allow to optionally use pcre's DFA algorithm.
197 79) Evaluate pcre alternatives.
199 80) Change FEATURE_EXTENDED_HOST_PATTERNS to support both
200 extended and vanilla host patterns at the same time.
202 Note that the requirement is to allow the user to decide
203 if the domain pattern should be interpreted as regex or
204 traditional host pattern and if it's not obvious that the
205 user made any decision, default to the latter.
207 Possible solutions would be:
209 1. An always-use-regex-domain-patterns config option
210 2. An enable-regex-domain-patterns-for-this-action-file option
211 3. An enable-regex-domain-patterns-for-this-action-file-until-the-user-says-otherwise option
212 4. A treat-the-domain-pattern-in-this-line-as-regex(-or-not) option
213 5. Combinations of the options above
215 With 2+4, 3+4 or 2+3+4 being the preferences until
218 82) Detect if the system time goes back in time let the user
219 know if it caused any connections to get closed.
221 85) Once #84 is done, write a script that populates a directory with
222 various common third-party icons (stumbleupon.png, facebook.png ...)
223 and redirect requests for them to Privoxy.
225 86) Add a server-body-tagger action. This is trivial as as all the
226 functionality required to do it already exists.
228 87) Add a client-body-tagger action. This is less trivial as we currently
229 don't buffer client bodies. After 14) is implemented it would be
232 88) Investigate if there's a Perl module that Privoxy-Regression-Test
233 could optionally use to keep connections alive, preferably while
234 requiring less forks at the same time.
236 89) When multiple block actions apply, consider showing all the block
237 reasons on the blocked page that haven't been overruled, not just
240 91) Add an optional limit for internal redirects. It would probably
241 be reasonable to default to a limit of one and showing an error
242 message if the request for the redirect URL would be redirected
245 92) The statistics currently aren't calculated correctly by Privoxy
246 as each thread is only counted as one request which is no longer
247 correct. This should be fixed, or the statistic code removed.
248 Privoxy-Log-Parser's provides more detailed statistics, anyway.
250 93) Add a config directive to let Privoxy explicitly request either
251 IPv4 (or IPv6) addresses, even if the system supports both.
252 Could be useful as a workaround for misconfigured setups where the
253 libc returns IPv6 addresses even if there's no IPv6 connectivity.
255 94) Add a config directive to let Privoxy prefer either IPv4 (or IPv6)
256 addresses, instead of trusting the libc to return them in an order
257 that makes sense. Like #93, this could be useful as a workaround
258 for misconfigured setups.
260 95) Support a non-standard client header in CONNECT requests that
261 contains the URL of the requested resource, which is then treated
262 like the request URL.
264 This way the client could opt-in for path-based blocking of https
265 requests. Given that the headers from the CONNECT request aren't
266 forwarded to the destination server, an unencrypted URL should be
267 acceptable if the client and Privoxy are running on the same system
268 or in a trusted environment.
270 96) Filters should be easier to look up. Currently get_filter() has to
271 go through all filters and skip the filter types the caller isn't
274 98) When showing action section on the CGI pages, properly escape
275 line breaks so they can be copy&pasted into action files without
278 99) Figure out a mechanism through which a user can easily enable
279 site-specific action sections that are too aggressive to be
280 enabled by default. This could be similar to the presettings
281 in default.action, but could also be just another action file
282 that isn't used by default.
284 100) Create a cross-platform Privoxy control program and retire
285 the win32 GUI. Integrate support for Privoxy-Regression-Test,
286 Privoxy-Log-Parser, Privoxy-Filter-Test, uagen and similar tools.
287 Interested donors: 1.
289 102) Add an include directive to split the config file into several parts.
291 103) Potential performance improvement for large action files:
292 when figuring out which actions apply, check the action bit mask
293 before pattern matching and skip section that wouldn't modify the
294 actions already set. To increase the impact the sections would have
295 to be applied in reverse.
297 104) The code to modify global_toggle_state should be factored out into
298 a separate function. Currently we mess with it in three different
299 files, but only in w32log.c the tray icon is explicitly set.
300 The logging is inconsistent as well. For details see #3525694.
302 105) Add support for socks authentication.
304 106) actionlist.h should be embedded in a way that causes less text
307 107) Support more pcrs variables, for example $destination-ip-address
308 and $source-ip-address.
310 108) Allow to use a somewhat random string instead of PRIVOXY-FORCE.
312 109) Let log_error() support the format specifier %S which should
313 work like %s but escape new lines like %N. This would be useful
314 to log the result of header filters which may inject new lines.
316 110) Add a global-buffer-limit directive that roughly limits how
317 much malloc'ed memory Privoxy will use and can potentially
318 be smaller than (buffer-limit * max-client-connections).
320 111) Reject requests if hosts and ports in request line and Host
321 header don't match (before filters have been applied).
323 112) If a header filter is used to inject another header by inserting
324 a \r\n (undocumented feature), detect it and split the headers so
325 following header actions do not treat them as a single string.
326 Alternatively add another header injection mechanism.
328 113) Log statistics upon receiving a certain signal (SIGINFO or SIGUSR1).
330 114) Properly deal with status code 100. The current "Continue hack"
331 can cause problems for gpg when uploading keys through Privoxy.
333 115) Add ICAP (RFC 3507) support. FR #3615158.
335 116) Due to the use of sscanf(), Privoxy currently will fail to properly
336 parse chunks whose size can't be represented with 32 bit. This is
337 unlikely to cause problems in the real world, but should eventually
338 be fixed anyway. See also:
339 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=959100
341 118) There should be "escaped" dynamic variables that are guaranteed
342 not to break filters.
344 119) Evaluate using pcre's jit mode.
346 120) Add an option to limit pcre's recursion limit below the default.
347 On some platforms the recursion limit doesn't prevent pcre from
348 running out of stack space, causing the kernel to kill Privoxy
351 121) Add HTTP/2 support. As a first step, incomming HTTP/1.x requests
352 should be translated to outgoing HTTP/2 requests where possible
353 (and if desired by the user).
354 Interested donors: 1.
356 122) Allow customized log messages.
358 123) Evaluate if the voluntarily-disclose-session-keys option in Firefox
359 (and other browsers) can be leveraged. Probably depends on #16.
361 124) Add support for the "lightweight OS capability and sandbox framework"
362 Capsicum. http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/capsicum/
363 Interested donors: 1.
365 125) Allow clients to HTTPS-encrypt the proxy connection.
366 Interested donors: 1.
368 126) Run the Co-Advisor HTTP compliance tests, evaluate the results,
369 fix the compliance issues that aren't by design and document
371 Note that Privoxy developers qualify for free account upgrades:
372 http://coad.measurement-factory.com/details.html#pricing
374 127) Add "real" CGI support (serve program output instead of forwarding
375 the request). The work is mostly done due to +external-filter{}.
377 128) Add a config directive to control the stack limit.
379 129) Completely implement RFC 7230 4.1 (Chunked Transfer Coding).
380 Currently Privoxy doesn't properly deal with trailers which
381 are rarely used in the real world but should be supported anyway.
383 130) Move header_tagger() out of the parser structs and let it execute
384 taggers one-by-one against all headers so the header order has less
385 influence on the tagging result. As a bonus, dynamic taggers would
386 have to be compiled less often.
388 131) The handle-as-empty-doc-returns-ok directive should be replaced with
389 an action so the behaviour can be enabled on a per-request basis.
390 Interested donors: 1.
392 133) Consider allowing bitcoin donations.
393 Interested donors: 2.
395 134) Track the total number of bytes written to and received from a socket.
397 135) Add OpenBSM audit support.
399 136) Make builds reproducible.
401 137) Add a (preferably vector-based) logo.
403 138) Bring back the scripts to provide actions file feedback.
405 Once upon a time (~2003) there were scripts on the webserver
406 to make reporting action file feedback more convenient for the
407 user and the actual reports more useful for the developers.
408 They have been unusable for years and have thus been disabled,
409 but making the reporting mechanism available again would be a
412 140) Toggling Privoxy off currently also disables stuff that
413 probably shouldn't be affected (such as actions like
414 forward-override). Investigate and fix or document.
416 141) Port Privoxy to CloudABI, which, despite the name, is actually
417 rather neet. https://github.com/NuxiNL/cloudlibc
419 142) Remove or update the "internal" pcre version.
421 143) Add support for OpenBSD's pledge feature once it's stablelized.
422 This should be a lot less work then #124.
424 146) Allow to save the internal client tag state to disk and
425 load it after restarts.
427 147) Improve "Building from Source" section in the user manual.
428 A common problem seems to be that it's not obvious to non-technical
429 users how the listed dependencies can be installed on the commonly
430 used platforms. Adding a couple of examples should also be useful for
431 technical users (like Privoxy developers) who want to install or test
432 Privoxy on platforms they are not familiar with.
434 148) Add a config directive to change the CGI_SITE_2_HOST
435 (default: config.privoxy.org).
437 If Privoxy is used as reverse proxy or intercepting proxy without
438 getting intercepted requests, error pages created from default templates
439 currently can result in client requests to config.privoxy.org on the
440 Internet which may not be desirable.
442 149) Use poll() for socket selection so the number of sockets Privoxy
443 can deal with isn't limited to FD_SETSIZE anymore.
445 150) Add blacklistd support.
447 151) Let the dok-tidy target work cross-platform without introducing
448 a ton of white-space changes that hide the content changes.
450 ##########################################################################
452 Hosting wish list (relevant for #53)
457 - Mailinglists (Mailman with public archives preferred)
458 - Webspace (on a Unix-like OS that works with the webserver targets
460 - Source code repositories (currently CVS, but migrating away
461 from it is TODO #54 anyway and shouldn't be too much trouble)
462 - Commit mails (preferably with unified diffs)
464 (Unsorted) details to look at when evaluating hosters:
466 1. Preferably no third-party ads and trackers.
467 External images, CSS and JavaScript may count as trackers
468 but texts like "supported by company XYZ" may be acceptable.
470 2. JavaScript should be optional or not used at all.
472 3. Services we don't need shouldn't be enabled anyway.
473 (We currently don't use Web forums, wikis, surveys etc.)
475 4. It would be preferable if the hoster didn't have a bad track
476 record as far as user experience, security and privacy are
477 concerned and if the terms of service are "reasonable" and
478 haven't changed too often in the past. Updates in the past
479 should have been improvements and not regressions.
481 5. It would be preferable if most of the server administration
482 is done by a trusted third-party (or at least not a lot of work
485 6. The server(s) should be located in a country with laws we can
486 understand and follow (or at least not unintentionally violate).
488 7. A server location in a country with some kind of due process
489 and strong data protection laws (at least on paper) would be
492 8. Given that Privoxy is a free software project it would be
493 preferable if the hoster would use free software where possible.
495 9. Migrating away from the hoster in the future without losing
496 any important data should be possible without writing web