1 $Id: TODO,v 1.76 2013/01/05 18:39:19 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 1) Add some regression tests. Filters should be tested automatically
10 (variables too). Could probably reuse large parts of Privoxy-Filter-Test.
11 Note that there is currently work in progress to leverage curl's
12 test suite which could be used for this as well.
14 3) Fix some more XXX: comments.
16 6) Remove actions that aren't needed anymore:
18 content-type-overwrite should probably stay as it's also
19 used by some of the CGI pages (XXX: name them).
21 crunch-client-header and crunch-server-header should probably
22 go, their only advantage is that their search strings can be
23 controlled through the CGI pages, other than that they only
26 crunch-if-none-match can be replaced with a header filter.
28 prevent-compression has a misleading name and could
29 be replaced with a header filter.
31 7) force-text-mode has a stupid name and should probably
32 be renamed to force-filter-mode.
34 8) handle-as-empty-document and handle-as-image should
35 be merged to something like handle-as{something} to
36 prevent them from being activated at the same time.
38 10) There's a bug in the CGI editor that turns the
39 first section's "Insert new section below" into
40 a "Insert new section above" button.
42 11) CGI templates should use semantically-correct HTML
45 12) Support pipelining for outgoing connections.
47 14) Allow to filter POST parameters.
49 15) If trusted CGI pages are requested without trusted referrer,
50 set the status code to 403 instead of 200.
52 16) Filter SSL encrypted content as well.
54 At the beginning we could use a unencrypted connection between
55 client and Privoxy, and use an encrypted connection between
56 Privoxy and the server.
58 This should be good enough for most of the content the
59 user would want to filter.
61 19) enable-forward-fallback. Syntax? Suggested by K.R.
63 21) User Manual delivery doesn't accept multiple slashes. Should it?
65 22) Verify action files properly (Including arguments) and
66 act accordingly (should probably intercept all requests
67 with a "Invalid option foo detected" CGI page).
69 23) Do the same in case of syntax errors in the configuration file,
70 instead of just exiting or ignoring the problem.
72 25) Handle multiple filters with the same name better. Reject them?
74 26) Let show-url-info detect clearly invalid URLs.
76 27) Make errno logging less thread-unsafe.
77 Verify that it's really an improvement.
79 28) Don't take default ports in case of invalid forwarding ports.
81 31) If a string action foo is disabled csp->action->string[ACTION_STRING_FOO]
82 doesn't necessarily contain NULL, but may contain the string of an
83 enabled foo action in an overruled section. Is it a bug? Does it matter?
85 32) In case of forwarding failures with socks port == 9050,
86 show extra info about Tor (the whole FAQ entry?).
88 36) Unload unused action files directly, even if they are
89 disabled without replacement.
91 38) In the final results, explicitly list disabled multi actions
92 with their parameters. Not as trivial as it sounds.
94 40) When running in daemon mode, Privoxy's working directory is '/'
95 which means it may not have permissions to dump core when necessary.
96 Figure out a way to solve this. Introduce a cwd config option?
98 41) Change documentation framework to one that works cross-platform.
101 42) Add a DTrace USDT provider. Now that FreeBSD has userland DTrace
102 support there's no longer any reason not to.
104 43) Write a tool to check URL patterns against URLs in the log file.
105 This could be included in Privoxy-Regression-Test.
107 44) Privoxy-Log-Parser: Consider highlighting "Connection" in:
108 23:13:03.506 283b6100 Header: Replaced: 'Connection: Keep-Alive' with 'Connection: close'
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 are already several threads
156 in the mailinglist archives about this. See also #41.
158 66) Stop hard-coding the 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 84) Flesh out the user-manual delivery to serve pages from
212 other directories, too.
214 85) Once #84 is done, write a script that populates a directory with
215 various common third-party icons (stumbleupon.png, facebook.png ...)
216 and redirect requests for them to Privoxy.
218 86) Add a server-body-tagger action. This is trivial as as all the
219 functionallity required to do it already exists.
221 87) Add a client-body-tagger action. This is less trivial as we currently
222 don't buffer client bodies. After 14) is implemented it would be
225 88) Investigate if there's a Perl module that Privoxy-Regression-Test
226 could optionally use to keep connections alive, preferably while
227 requiring less forks at the same time.
229 89) When multiple block actions apply, consider showing all the block
230 reasons on the blocked page that haven't been overruled, not just
233 90) Implement NO-TAG: patterns that enable a section if the
234 provided pattern doesn't match any TAG. This would make
237 91) Add an optional limit for internal redirects. It would probably
238 be reasonable to default to a limit of one and showing an error
239 message if the request for the redirect URL would be redirected
242 92) The statistics currently aren't calculated correctly by Privoxy
243 as each thread is only counted as one request which is no longer
244 correct. This should be fixed, or the statistic code removed.
245 Privoxy-Log-Parser's provides more detailed statistics, anyway.
247 93) Add a config directive to let Privoxy explicitly request either
248 IPv4 (or IPv6) addresses, even if the system supports both.
249 Could be useful as a workaround for misconfigured setups where the
250 libc returns IPv6 addresses even if there's no IPv6 connectivity.
252 94) Add a config directive to let Privoxy prefer either IPv4 (or IPv6)
253 addresses, instead of trusting the libc to return them in an order
254 that makes sense. Like #93, this could be useful as a workaround
255 for misconfigured setups.
257 95) Support a non-standard client header in CONNECT requests that
258 contains the URL of the requested ressource, which is then treated
259 like the request URL.
261 This way the client could opt-in for path-based blocking of https
262 requests. Given that the headers from the CONNECT request aren't
263 forwarded to the destination server, an unencrypted URL should be
264 acceptable if the client and Privoxy are running on the same system
265 or in a trusted environment.
267 96) Enabled filters should be easier to look up. Currently most functions
268 that work with filters spent more (duplicated) code on finding
269 filters than on actually doing something useful with them. Dividing
270 filters by type instead of filter file would reduce the lookup-code
273 98) When showing action section on the CGI pages, properly escape
274 line breaks so they can be copy&pasted into action files without
277 99) Figure out a mechanism through which a user can easily enable
278 site-specific action sections that are too aggressive to be
279 enalbled by default. This could be similiar to the presettings
280 in default.action, but could also be just another action file
281 that isn't used by default.
283 100) Create a cross-platform Privoxy control program and retire
284 the win32 GUI. Integrate support for Privoxy-Regression-Test,
285 Privoxy-Log-Parser, Privoxy-Filter-Test, uagen and similar tools.
287 102) Add an include directive to split the config file into several parts.
289 103) Potential performance improvement for large action files:
290 when figuring out which actions apply, check the action bitmask
291 before pattern matching and skip section that wouldn't modify the
292 actions already set. To increase the impact the sections would have
293 to be applied in reverse.
295 104) The code to modify global_toggle_state should be factored out into
296 a separate function. Currently we mess with it in three different
297 files, but only in w32log.c the tray icon is explicitly set.
298 The logging is inconsistent as well. For details see #3525694.
300 105) Add support for socks authentication.
302 106) actionlist.h should be embedded in a way that causes less text
305 107) Support more pcrs variables, for example $destination-ip-address
306 and $source-ip-address.
308 108) Allow to use a somewhat random string intead of PRIVOXY-FORCE.