In D2581#385098, @emaste wrote:

IMO ought to be committed.

Previous diff has been wrong from scratch (wrong file imported).

Look good, thanks.

Just one more note - despite I'm not using the patch now, I used it for long time, so it may be considered "verified in production".

As I'm author of the original report, I would like to clarify details. The issue addresses by this proposal still exist and the patch solve them. I no longer use BOOTPD for network management (we are using DHCPD instead). In the fact, I'm not sure there is even one actively maintained installation using BOOTPD on the today's world.

Patch seems to be correct and safe (as claimed in my previous comment), but comments on lines 42-43 needs to be modified to reflect the change of code.

The condition has been added by PHK in revision 4101 (20 years ago) with the comment "Don't set hostname if we already have it. (diskless)."
I wish it has been because of /etc/rc.d/diskless script. Such script has been used to set hostname on diskless installation, so rc.d/hostname has not been welcomed to overwrite the name later. rc.d/diskless has been dropped in 127347 revision. Currently no other /etc/rc.d/* script sets hostname, so conditional in /etc/rc.d/hostname can be removed with no harm AFAIK.