Is anything being done to un-break partition names?

[Juli Mallett]

Hey folks,

If I install 7.2 (or old 8-CURRENT) and partition a drive "dangerously
dedicated" and answer No when asked if I want to create a true
partition entry, and then install as normal, my system is set up with
partitions named like da0s1a.  Newer 8-CURRENT instead names the
devices da0a, which means root mount fails, etc., until one updates
/etc/fstab.  This also seems to confuse sysinstall, which appears to
expect labeling da0s1 to work even if you're in dangerously-dedicated
mode — though I might be misunderstanding the interactions there;
randi@ suggests it's just a problem with sanitizing disk names in
libdisk, although when I built sysinstall with a patched libdisk and
tried to use it when booting from an 8-CURRENT (snapshot as of a few
weeks back) livefs disk, it seemed to have other problems with the
device names.

This seems like a huge POLA violation and has eaten several hours of
my life in terms of fixing servers that were tracking 8-CURRENT and
failed to boot up because of the need to change /etc/fstab that wasn't
documented in UPDATING.

Is anything being done to add compatibility slice names, or to teach
mergemaster about the change?  I don't know enough about what all is
going on on disk to know whether this is something that just affects
dangerously-dedicated disks, but it seems to be consistently biting
me, and I can only imagine how much trouble it's going to cause
others.  Was this change even intentional?

Juli.