I'm not too sure about changing the type of a sysctl knob that has existed for a long time. The only compatibility problem that I can see doing this is potentially breaking reporting in an application that would call sysctl(3) (or sysctlbyname(3)) directly, passing an unitialized integer and then reading from it, as only the first byte would have been filled. Setting the boolean would still work (except on big-endian arches). The use of an old sysctl(8) utility is not affected.

If you feel that's not OK, I could change that part of the commit if necessary, introducing a specific handler to paper over the difference between the sysctl knob type and the field's one.