1 Some Privoxy-related tasks, sorted by the time they
2 have been added, not by priority.
4 The latest version should be available at:
5 https://www.privoxy.org/gitweb/?p=privoxy.git;a=blob_plain;f=TODO;hb=HEAD
7 There's work in progress to fund development on these items using
8 donations. If you want to donate, please have a look at:
9 https://www.privoxy.org/faq/general.html#DONATE
11 1) Add more regression tests. Filters should be tested automatically
12 (variables too). Could probably reuse large parts of Privoxy-Filter-Test.
13 Note that there is currently work in progress to leverage curl's
14 test suite, patches have been submitted upstream:
15 http://curl.haxx.se/mail/lib-2014-06/0070.html
17 3) Fix some more XXX: comments.
19 6) Remove actions that aren't needed anymore:
21 content-type-overwrite should probably stay as it's also
22 used by some of the CGI pages (XXX: name them).
24 crunch-client-header and crunch-server-header should probably
25 go, their only advantage is that their search strings can be
26 controlled through the CGI pages, other than that they only
29 crunch-if-none-match can be replaced with a header filter.
31 prevent-compression has a misleading name and could
32 be replaced with a header filter.
34 7) force-text-mode has a stupid name and should probably
35 be renamed to force-filter-mode.
37 8) handle-as-empty-document and handle-as-image should
38 be merged to something like handle-as{something} to
39 prevent them from being activated at the same time.
41 10) There's a bug in the CGI editor that turns the
42 first section's "Insert new section below" into
43 a "Insert new section above" button.
45 11) CGI templates should use semantically-correct HTML
50 12) Support pipelining for outgoing connections.
52 14) Allow to filter POST parameters.
54 19) enable-forward-fallback. Syntax? Suggested by K.R.
56 21) User Manual delivery doesn't accept multiple slashes. Should it?
58 22) Verify action files properly (Including arguments) and
59 act accordingly (should probably intercept all requests
60 with a "Invalid option foo detected" CGI page).
62 23) Do the same in case of syntax errors in the configuration file,
63 instead of just exiting or ignoring the problem.
65 25) Handle multiple filters with the same name better. Reject them?
67 26) Let show-url-info detect clearly invalid URLs.
69 27) Make errno logging less thread-unsafe.
70 Verify that it's really an improvement.
72 28) Don't take default ports in case of invalid forwarding ports.
74 31) If a string action foo is disabled csp->action->string[ACTION_STRING_FOO]
75 doesn't necessarily contain NULL, but may contain the string of an
76 enabled foo action in an overruled section. Is it a bug? Does it matter?
78 32) In case of forwarding failures with socks port == 9050,
79 show extra info about Tor (the whole FAQ entry?).
81 36) Unload unused action files directly, even if they are
82 disabled without replacement.
84 38) In the final results, explicitly list disabled multi actions
85 with their parameters. Not as trivial as it sounds.
87 40) When running in daemon mode, Privoxy's working directory is '/'
88 which means it may not have permissions to dump core when necessary.
89 Figure out a way to solve this. Introduce a cwd config option?
91 41) Change documentation framework to one that works cross-platform.
92 Evaluate WML and txt2tags.
94 42) Add a DTrace USDT provider. Now that FreeBSD has userland DTrace
95 support there's no longer any reason not to.
97 43) Write a tool to check URL patterns against URLs in the log file.
98 This could be included in Privoxy-Regression-Test.
100 44) Privoxy-Log-Parser: Consider highlighting "Connection" in:
101 23:13:03.506 283b6100 Header: Replaced: 'Connection: Keep-Alive' with 'Connection: close'
103 50) Investigate possible PCRS template speedup when searching
104 macros with strstr() before compiling pcrs commands.
105 Investigated, needs some restructuring but is probably worth it.
107 51) Make user-manual directive more generic to allow serving the FAQ
108 and files from user-specified directories. Consider changing the
109 port for "same origin policy" issues.
111 53) Find a more reliable hoster. Involves finding out what our
112 requirements are and which SF alternatives fulfil them.
113 It would probably also make sense to look into what other
114 projects did when migrating away from SF.
116 2014-05: Work in progress. Hosting wish list at the end
117 of this file. Looks like most of the other projects
118 that left SF had lower standards and moved to hosters
119 that don't come close to sattisfying the requirements.
120 2016-03: The website has been moved away from SF infrastructure
121 and is also available through https:// now.
122 2016-04: Server rent for a year has been sponsored by ChameleonJohn.
123 2016-04: The SF mailing lists have been deprecated, the new ones
124 are available at: https://lists.privoxy.org/
126 Interested donors: 1.
128 58) Move more template strings from the code into the actual templates.
130 59) Import the German template translation.
132 60) Ask the Russian translators for input on how to make their
135 61) Consider (optionally?) skipping the hostname comparison when
136 checking if a connections that goes to a HTTP proxy can be reused.
137 Do all HTTP proxy support that? Is it worth it?
139 63) Reject clearly too large requests earlier?
141 64) Use proper copyright attribution. "Privoxy Developers"
144 65) Polish Website. Probably involves ditching the Docbook
145 mess. There are already several threads in the mailinglist
146 archives about this. See also #41.
148 66) Stop hard-coding the number of action and filter files.
150 67) Clean up source code directory layout.
152 68) Use standard make syntax so we don't depend on GNU make.
154 69) Update autoconf setup (or move away from it).
155 Unfortunately the autoconf files can't be simply updated
156 due to license issues:
157 https://lists.privoxy.org/pipermail/privoxy-devel/2016-April/000008.html
159 70) If the server connection is reset but the headers are
160 received, consider passing the mess to the client instead
161 of showing the connect-failed template. Relates to #2698674.
163 74) Let Privoxy-Regression-Test optionally check that action
164 sections which disable actions actually are preceded by
165 sections that enable said actions.
167 75) Create a tool that creates Privoxy action (and filter?) files
168 out of adblock files. Could be implemented as option for
169 url-pattern-translator.pl.
171 76) Cache DNS responses. Note that this has been requested
172 several times by users, but is not a developer priority.
173 If you care about this, feel free to submit patches.
175 77) Allow to configure the IP address used in outgoing connections.
177 78) Allow to optionally use pcre's DFA algorithm.
179 79) Evaluate pcre alternatives.
181 82) Detect if the system time goes back in time let the user
182 know if it caused any connections to get closed.
184 85) Once #51 is done, write a script that populates a directory with
185 various common third-party icons (stumbleupon.png, facebook.png ...)
186 and redirect requests for them to Privoxy.
188 86) Add a server-body-tagger action. This is trivial as as all the
189 functionality required to do it already exists.
191 87) Add a client-body-tagger action. This is less trivial as we currently
192 don't buffer client bodies. After 14) is implemented it would be
195 88) Investigate if there's a Perl module that Privoxy-Regression-Test
196 could optionally use to keep connections alive, preferably while
197 requiring less forks at the same time.
199 89) When multiple block actions apply, consider showing all the block
200 reasons on the blocked page that haven't been overruled, not just
203 91) Add an optional limit for internal redirects. It would probably
204 be reasonable to default to a limit of one and showing an error
205 message if the request for the redirect URL would be redirected
208 92) The statistics currently aren't calculated correctly by Privoxy
209 as each thread is only counted as one request which is no longer
210 correct. This should be fixed, or the statistic code removed.
211 Privoxy-Log-Parser's provides more detailed statistics, anyway.
213 93) Add a config directive to let Privoxy explicitly request either
214 IPv4 (or IPv6) addresses, even if the system supports both.
215 Could be useful as a workaround for misconfigured setups where the
216 libc returns IPv6 addresses even if there's no IPv6 connectivity.
218 94) Add a config directive to let Privoxy prefer either IPv4 (or IPv6)
219 addresses, instead of trusting the libc to return them in an order
220 that makes sense. Like #93, this could be useful as a workaround
221 for misconfigured setups.
223 96) Filters should be easier to look up. Currently get_filter() has to
224 go through all filters and skip the filter types the caller isn't
227 98) When showing action sections on the CGI pages, properly escape
228 line breaks so they can be copy&pasted into action files without
231 99) Figure out a mechanism through which a user can easily enable
232 site-specific action sections that are too aggressive to be
233 enabled by default. This could be similar to the presettings
234 in default.action, but could also be just another action file
235 that isn't used by default.
237 100) Create a cross-platform Privoxy control program and retire
238 the win32 GUI. Integrate support for Privoxy-Regression-Test,
239 Privoxy-Log-Parser, Privoxy-Filter-Test, uagen and similar tools.
240 Interested donors: 1.
242 102) Add an include directive to split the config file into several parts.
244 103) Potential performance improvement for large action files:
245 when figuring out which actions apply, check the action bit mask
246 before pattern matching and skip section that wouldn't modify the
247 actions already set. To increase the impact the sections would have
248 to be applied in reverse.
250 104) The code to modify global_toggle_state should be factored out into
251 a separate function. Currently we mess with it in three different
252 files, but only in w32log.c the tray icon is explicitly set.
253 The logging is inconsistent as well. For details see #3525694.
255 106) actionlist.h should be embedded in a way that causes less text
258 107) Support more pcrs variables, for example $destination-ip-address
259 and $source-ip-address.
261 108) Allow to use a somewhat random string instead of PRIVOXY-FORCE.
263 109) Let log_error() support the format specifier %S which should
264 work like %s but escape new lines like %N. This would be useful
265 to log the result of header filters which may inject new lines.
267 110) Add a global-buffer-limit directive that roughly limits how
268 much malloc'ed memory Privoxy will use and can potentially
269 be smaller than (buffer-limit * max-client-connections).
271 111) Reject requests if hosts and ports in request line and Host
272 header don't match (before filters have been applied).
274 112) If a header filter is used to inject another header by inserting
275 a \r\n (undocumented feature), detect it and split the headers so
276 following header actions do not treat them as a single string.
277 Alternatively add another header injection mechanism.
279 113) Log statistics upon receiving a certain signal (SIGINFO or SIGUSR1).
281 114) Properly deal with status code 100. The current "Continue hack"
282 can cause problems for gpg when uploading keys through Privoxy.
284 115) Add ICAP (RFC 3507) support. FR #3615158.
286 116) Due to the use of sscanf(), Privoxy currently will fail to properly
287 parse chunks whose size can't be represented with 32 bit. This is
288 unlikely to cause problems in the real world, but should eventually
289 be fixed anyway. See also:
290 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=959100
292 118) There should be "escaped" dynamic variables that are guaranteed
293 not to break filters.
295 119) Evaluate using pcre's jit mode.
297 120) Add an option to limit pcre's recursion limit below the default.
298 On some platforms the recursion limit doesn't prevent pcre from
299 running out of stack space, causing the kernel to kill Privoxy
302 121) Add HTTP/2 support. As a first step, incoming HTTP/1.x requests
303 should be translated to outgoing HTTP/2 requests where possible
304 (and if desired by the user).
305 Interested donors: 1.
307 122) Allow customized log messages.
309 124) Add support for the "lightweight OS capability and sandbox framework"
310 Capsicum. http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/capsicum/
311 Interested donors: 1.
313 125) Allow clients to HTTPS-encrypt the proxy connection.
314 Interested donors: 1.
316 126) Run the Co-Advisor HTTP compliance tests, evaluate the results,
317 fix the compliance issues that aren't by design and document
319 Note that Privoxy developers qualify for free account upgrades:
320 http://coad.measurement-factory.com/details.html#pricing
322 127) Add "real" CGI support (serve program output instead of forwarding
323 the request). The work is mostly done due to +external-filter{}.
325 128) Add a config directive to control the stack limit.
327 129) Completely implement RFC 7230 4.1 (Chunked Transfer Coding).
328 Currently Privoxy doesn't properly deal with trailers which
329 are rarely used in the real world but should be supported anyway.
331 130) Move header_tagger() out of the parser structs and let it execute
332 taggers one-by-one against all headers so the header order has less
333 influence on the tagging result. As a bonus, dynamic taggers would
334 have to be compiled less often.
336 131) The handle-as-empty-doc-returns-ok directive should be replaced with
337 an action so the behaviour can be enabled on a per-request basis.
338 Interested donors: 1.
340 133) Consider allowing bitcoin donations.
341 Interested donors: 2.
343 134) Track the total number of bytes written to and received from a socket.
345 135) Add OpenBSM audit support.
347 136) Make builds reproducible.
349 137) Add a (preferably vector-based) logo.
351 138) Bring back the scripts to provide actions file feedback.
353 Once upon a time (~2003) there were scripts on the webserver
354 to make reporting action file feedback more convenient for the
355 user and the actual reports more useful for the developers.
356 They have been unusable for years and have thus been disabled,
357 but making the reporting mechanism available again would be a
360 140) Toggling Privoxy off currently also disables stuff that
361 probably shouldn't be affected (such as actions like
362 forward-override). Investigate and fix or document.
364 141) Port Privoxy to CloudABI, which, despite the name, is actually
365 rather neat. https://github.com/NuxiNL/cloudlibc
367 142) Remove or update the "internal" pcre version.
369 143) Add support for OpenBSD's pledge feature once it's stablelized.
370 This should be a lot less work then #124.
372 146) Allow to save the internal client tag state to disk and
373 load it after restarts.
375 147) Improve "Building from Source" section in the user manual.
376 A common problem seems to be that it's not obvious to non-technical
377 users how the listed dependencies can be installed on the commonly
378 used platforms. Adding a couple of examples should also be useful for
379 technical users (like Privoxy developers) who want to install or test
380 Privoxy on platforms they are not familiar with.
382 148) Add a config directive to change the CGI_SITE_2_HOST
383 (default: config.privoxy.org).
385 If Privoxy is used as reverse proxy or intercepting proxy without
386 getting intercepted requests, error pages created from default templates
387 currently can result in client requests to config.privoxy.org on the
388 Internet which may not be desirable.
390 150) Add blacklistd support.
392 151) Let the dok-tidy target work cross-platform without introducing
393 a ton of white-space changes that hide the content changes.
395 152) Fix CSS references in the website documentation.
396 For many pages p_doc.css is specified twice using different paths.
397 Usually at least one works, but not all of them do and the
398 duplicated requests are pointless even if they don't end up with
401 153) Catch SIGINT and use it to close the listen socket, serve
402 remaining connections and shut down. This would allow higher
403 uptime and make testing more convenient.
405 154) Underline links in docs and cgi pages. More precisely,
406 don't mess with the browser defaults for link underlining.
408 155) The sig_handler() shouldn't call log_error().
409 While it isn't known to cause actual problems in normal operation,
410 it's technically incorrect and causes crashes when running in
413 156) Reject socks requests with an explicit error message similar
414 to the one used for ftp. Motivation:
415 https://lists.privoxy.org/pipermail/privoxy-users/2017-March/000195.html
417 158) Use a single thread to wait for new requests on reused client connections.
418 Currently the thread that handles the first request on a connection
419 stays responsible for the client connect until it gets closed.
420 In case of lots of idle connections lots of waiting threads are used.
421 While it's conceivable that this ineffiency is irrelevant from a
422 performance point of view, using a single thread should reduce Privoxy's
423 memory footprint a bit which may be noticeable in case of multi-user setups
424 with hundreds of idle connections.
426 ##########################################################################
428 Hosting wish list (relevant for #53)
433 - Mailinglists (Mailman with public archives preferred)
434 - Webspace (on a Unix-like OS that works with the webserver targets
437 - Commit mails (preferably with unified diffs)
439 (Unsorted) details to look at when evaluating hosters:
441 1. Preferably no third-party ads and trackers.
442 External images, CSS and JavaScript may count as trackers
443 but texts like "supported by company XYZ" may be acceptable.
445 2. JavaScript should be optional or not used at all.
447 3. Services we don't need shouldn't be enabled anyway.
448 (We currently don't use Web forums, wikis, surveys etc.)
450 4. It would be preferable if the hoster didn't have a bad track
451 record as far as user experience, security and privacy are
452 concerned and if the terms of service are "reasonable" and
453 haven't changed too often in the past. Updates in the past
454 should have been improvements and not regressions.
456 5. It would be preferable if most of the server administration
457 is done by a trusted third-party (or at least not a lot of work
460 6. The server(s) should be located in a country with laws we can
461 understand and follow (or at least not unintentionally violate).
463 7. A server location in a country with some kind of due process
464 and strong data protection laws (at least on paper) would be
467 8. Given that Privoxy is a free software project it would be
468 preferable if the hoster would use free software where possible.
470 9. Migrating away from the hoster in the future without losing
471 any important data should be possible without writing web