[Privoxy-devel] Changing the Privoxy version number scheme

[Ian Silvester]

I like this idea Roland. Since indeed the version numbering is arbitrary we need an arbitrary reason to bump to v4.x.

If we consider that client tagging and HTTPS inspection have been in 'public beta' since their release (and perhaps HTTPS still is, per your message yesterday Fabian!), then that would be a nice arbitrary reason to go for a fanfare 4.0 release?

I'm not familiar with how complex it is to set up client tagging so I don't know whether this warrants a howto, but I definitely agree that HTTPS inspection configuration deserves promoting from a FAQ entry to an article in the user guide. This should include the means to configure it to operate for all sites, since I expect that is the likely intended use case for most users (and for whom it might not be obvious). I would be happy to write this article; having had to update the user guide in the relatively recent past I think I can remember the various gotchas of our document generation process.

Cheers all,

Ian

On Thu, 5 Jan 2023, at 10:36, Roland Rosenfeld wrote:
> Hi Ian!
>
> On Thu, 05 Jan 2023, Ian Silvester wrote:
>
>> By the by, one item to include in the release notes will be HTTPS
>> inspection support for macOS - just this morning I had confirmation
>> from my UAT tester.
>
> Maybe it would be an option to release 4.0 with two great "new" features:
> HTTPS inspection and Client-Tags.
> Both of them are really great, but it's quite hard to understand how
> they need to be configured.
> So we could launch 4.0 with two new HOWTOs, that explain step by step
> with examples how to configure them.
> Okay, someone has to write these HOWTOs first, but Fabian suggested to
> change the version scheme _after_ the next release, so this should be
> possible.
>
> One of the SourceForge tickets on HTTPS inspection shows, that it
> isn't clear for everybody, how this works with a local CA that is
> trusted by different browsers (getting a LetEncrypt Certificate is
> different from building a local CA, which is used by privoxy to
> generate website certificates itself) etc.
> It is also necessary to explain how to prepare privoxy to handle this
> and how to configure all the stuff.
> And not to forget a little digression to explain how certificate
> problems are "tunneled" to the browser via privoxy (since I don't want
> to access https pages in an insecure way).
>
> In the next step we can explain how HTTPS inspection can be configured
> for only some sites but not all and switch over to Client-Tags which
> can be used to temporarily enable/disable HTTPS inspection via
> http://config.privoxy.org/client-tags (and how to enable/disable TOR
> as SOCKS proxy via the same mechanism).  I got all this up and
> running, but have to grep via my config files and the documentation to
> find out how all this depends on each other.
>
> Last but not least you may have noticed, that my English is not that
> fluent...
>
> But maybe all these new features in combination with a HOWTO would be
> worth incrementing the major version.
>
> Greetings
> Roland