contribution-ideas.md



I have time, how can I help?

Packaging

Look into AppImage + https://github.com/probonopd/linuxdeployqt.
We've not considered that option too much in the past, but it might give us
a decent, self-contained alternative to snap etc.


Linux


Revamp vpn helper architecture: there're problems, of course, but we can try
to isolate the client gui from the vpn helper itself (and "ship it" as
a binary under the single bundle, as I do now with bitmak-root). An idea
that's been floating around for a long time is to recycle the helper
interface, and have a long-lived privileged helper that does the vpn
connection using openvpn3 libr.
elijah was initially supporting a short-lived helper (what we have right now
with bitmask-root), but perhaps the integration can be done right with pkexec
or otherwise (separate users in linux etc). This has the additional advantage
of allowing us to do a very early startup, and not to depend so much on
pkexec + ubuntu's quirks (portability!).


Other discrete projects

Secure, automated upgrade mechanism (look at TUF and the Qt Updater Framework).
Log viewer / log sender
VPN Traffic panel (statistics, ip, gw health, graph for upload/download speeds)
Migrate codebase to Qt6
Reduce the size of custom static builds
Apple + Windows stores
Convert snap to use a qt5 base (so that updates are kept small).
Provider-agnostic bitmask.
Private bridges mechanism.
QR-bootstrap