Some Privoxy-related tasks, sorted by the time they
have been added, not by priority.
The latest version should be available at:
https://www.privoxy.org/gitweb/?p=privoxy.git;a=blob_plain;f=TODO;hb=HEAD
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/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:
https://curl.se/mail/lib-2014-06/0070.html
https://curl.se/mail/lib-2021-01/0068.html
3) Fix some more XXX: comments.
6) Remove actions that aren't needed anymore:
content-type-overwrite should probably stay as it's also
used by some of the CGI pages (XXX: name them).
crunch-client-header and crunch-server-header should probably
go, their only advantage is that their search strings can be
controlled through the CGI pages, other than that they only
have disadvantages.
crunch-if-none-match can be replaced with a header filter.
prevent-compression has a misleading name and could
be replaced with a header filter.
7) force-text-mode has a stupid name and should probably
be renamed to force-filter-mode.
8) handle-as-empty-document and handle-as-image should
be merged to something like handle-as{something} to
prevent them from being activated at the same time.
10) There's a bug in the CGI editor that turns the
first section's "Insert new section below" into
a "Insert new section above" button.
11) CGI templates should use semantically-correct HTML
and scale properly.
Work in progress.
12) Support pipelining for outgoing connections.
19) enable-forward-fallback. Syntax? Suggested by K.R.
21) User Manual delivery doesn't accept multiple slashes. Should it?
22) Verify action files properly (Including arguments) and
act accordingly (should probably intercept all requests
with a "Invalid option foo detected" CGI page).
23) Do the same in case of syntax errors in the configuration file,
instead of just exiting or ignoring the problem.
25) Handle multiple filters with the same name better. Reject them?
26) Let show-url-info detect clearly invalid URLs.
27) Make errno logging less thread-unsafe.
Verify that it's really an improvement.
28) Don't take default ports in case of invalid forwarding ports.
31) If a string action foo is disabled csp->action->string[ACTION_STRING_FOO]
doesn't necessarily contain NULL, but may contain the string of an
enabled foo action in an overruled section. Is it a bug? Does it matter?
32) In case of forwarding failures with socks port == 9050,
show extra info about Tor (the whole FAQ entry?).
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.
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 and txt2tags.
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'
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 files from user-specified directories. Consider changing the
port for "same origin policy" issues.
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.
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/
Interested donors: 1.
58) Move more template strings from the code into the actual templates.
59) Import the German template translation.
60) Ask the Russian translators for input on how to make their
life easier.
61) Consider (optionally?) skipping the hostname comparison when
checking if a connections that goes to a HTTP proxy can be reused.
Do all HTTP proxy support that? Is it worth it?
63) Reject clearly too large requests earlier?
64) Use proper copyright attribution. "Privoxy Developers"
is no legal entity.
65) Polish Website. Probably involves ditching the Docbook
mess. There are already several threads in the mailinglist
archives about this. See also #41.
66) Stop hard-coding the number of action and filter files.
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.
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. Before doing that, the already
existing solutions should probably be evaluated to see if
they do the job already or could be improved.
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. Work in progress.
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.
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.
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.
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.
165) Add a max-connections-per-client directive.
167) Set up a public Privoxy-Filter-Test instance.
168) Add a privacy policy.
169) Preserve all relevant copyright and license statements in binary
packages we distribute.
170) Serve the ca-cert-file through the CGI interface so clients
can conveniently import it (insecurely).
171) Create a "view page using Privoxy" website where users can input
an URL and get a screenshot of a browser fetching the URL
through Privoxy.
172) Create a public git repository for Privoxy-Filter-Test.
173) Document Privoxy's governance model.
174) Let the Tor Onion Service for the privoxy website
serve gitweb and the git repository as well.
175) Add more screenshots to the documentation and website.
176) Find a new fiduciary sponsor as a replacement for Zwiebelfreunde e.V.,
so that we can continue to receive tax-deductible donations in Europe.
177) Support https-inspection for intercepted requests.
178) Warn on http://config.privoxy.org/client-tags if a Tag name
hasn't at least one matching action section.
179) Add a add-server-header{} action to add headers to the response
sent to the client (including responses generated by Privoxy itself).
180) Add support for GnuTLS.
181) Allow to upgrade an http request to https behind the
client's back using a client-header filter.
182) Before enforcing the client-header-order, check that the
client headers actually need sorting. Should reduce log
messages and memory allocations.
183) Properly deal with proxy responses that arrive in multiple pieces
when https inspecting while using a forwarding proxy.
184) Add support for wolfSSL. Work in progress, expected to be
committed after the 3.0.34 release. Funded with donations
made to the Privoxy project.
185) The mbedTLS and OpenSSL versions of generate_host_certificate()
should only be called when necessary and the check should be
done without holding the certificate mutex.
186) Privoxy should handle "OPTIONS *" requests properly.
187) There should be a convenient way to see the versions of
the libraries Privoxy is using.
188) In the windows config.txt file, add the line
user-manual ./doc/user-manual/
right after
# Copyright ...
#
189) Bring back binary packages for macOS, preferably for both Intel and M1.
The first step would be getting at least one build system, either
donated or bought with donations earmarked for this.
Interested donors: 0.
190) The socks5 authentication code should send user name an password
seperately or we should increase the cbuf size to allow longer
user names and passwords.
191) The cipher-list directive should be split into cipher-list-server
and cipher-list-client.
192) The client TLS contexts should probably be shared among threads
to spend less time and memory loading the root certificates.
193) Use SHA256 instead of MD5 for the host hash used when generating file
names for host certificates and keys.
194) There should be a way to force gif deanimation if the server does not
declare the content as gif.
195) We should probably cache the server TLS contexts.
196) Investigate if it's worth adding an optional mutex for the CGI handler.
Could reduce memory use and increase performance on single core systems
for some tests.
197) Investigate if parts of Privoxy should get optional replacements
written in Rust.
198) Add a config directive that prevent's IP addresses from being logged
(when logging is enabled).
199) In actions.c the "#define DEFINE_ACTION_ALIAS 0" lines should probably
be changed to "#undef DEFINE_ACTION_ALIAS" or removed.
200) Add a config directive that causes Privoxy to remove all
host certificates before exiting.
##########################################################################
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.
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