Spin-off a standalone filtering library

[gorhill]

In case other devs would want to use it.

It won't support HTTPSB-matrix inheritance, as this is rather HTTPSB-UI-specific.

It will though support ABP net filtering and plain hostname-based filtering.

[jonvuri]

Perhaps the filtering pipeline could be re-implemented a stream, with each part of the filtering being an intermediate transform/filter on the stream? That way it would be trivial to implement the matrix-style filtering as well as more flexible variations.

[gorhill]

Perhaps the filtering pipeline could be re-implemented a stream

I think I will focus on making an as efficient as possible atomic filtering engine. From there, as performance allows, users of the library could run a single request through many queries to the filtering engine according to their own filtering heuristic.

[jonvuri]

Do you have a general idea of how that interface would look? Like, what would ??? be:

switchboard.filter(webRequest, ???);

[jonvuri]

Regarding discussion in #86 I just want to clarify if this library will support all of the functionality of HTTPSB, namely filtering different types of requests (img, frame, etc.), or if that will have to be implemented on top of it. (Also above question still standing.)

[gorhill]

A low-level library. Supply it with ABP-compatible filters or plain hostnames (which really translate into ABP-compatible ||example.com^), then test a URL against it, optionally with context info (request type, doc domain, etc). ABP-compatible filters support request types (||example.com^$image or ||example.com^$~stylesheet). I don't know how else to describe it.

[jonvuri]

Okay, I suppose that sounds like it would work well enough, though it wasn't what I was expecting. Is that how HTTPSB currently works internally?

Also, would this new library also be used by HTTPSB? That would seem to be best so that any new optimizations in the future are also leveraged by other consumers of the engine.

[gorhill]

would this new library also be used by HTTPSB?

No, I consider HTTPSB matrix filtering + ABP filtering pipeline to be higher-level application-specific feature.

[jonvuri]

Oh, I see. But then you could still use the library for the ABP part of the pipeline right? I am only concerned that the library will stagnate in the long term if it is not leveraged by the upstream.

[kurtextrem]

That plan sounds great.