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I upvoted, but I wanted to correct a small thing.

> ...they are mostly hopeless to try to apply to portable software after the fact if the devs aren't constantly testing with it.

They don't have to be hopeless. They were pretty easy ([1], [2]) to add to my bc.

[1]: https://git.yzena.com/gavin/bc/commit/3e8cd345de9d5b65ac7c33...

[2]: https://git.yzena.com/gavin/bc/commit/b6c65bb44c910c054bedfa...

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Yes. That's awesome!

I was referring to the OpenBSD devs trying to hack pledges into other people's software by trying to guess what capabilities it needs while porting. That's not a good thing to try to do -- see also all the various attempts at guessing seccomp profiles in the Linux world, which has the same problem.

Has been done to some 3rd party applications. Notably Chromium is pledged an unveiled, Firefox (unveil), pdf readers, compression tools, mail clients, ...

grep the ports tree for pledge patches.

I see what you mean now, and I think you are completely correct in that!

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