A complete beginner's problem: hostname 'flashair' needed to be 'flashair.local'

[wrb1223]

Thank you so much for providing these utilities for the excellent FlashAir, sadly like its not-so-excellent predecessor the Eye-Fi card, now consigned to unsupported obsolescence. This code provides a reliable sync function that I have been trying in vain to build in PHP for about three years now, without success.

Please excuse these comments from someone who was completely ignorant of Github, Python and its Mac OS environment just two days ago, but the only difficulty I had (like others) was the hostname being hard-defined in .info as ‘Flashair’. ‘Flashair’ has never worked for me, I have always had to use ‘Flashair.local’ when constructing URLs (I don’t know what the rules are about whether .local should be implied when resolving hostnames, but clearly my machine doesn’t think it should. Also changing the hostname in the Flashair CONFIG file never seems to make any difference). Turning on debugging for flashair-config showed the URL the code had constructed to talk to the Flashair CGI, and it was obvious that URLs were being correctly constructed with 'Flashair' as the hostname, but then failing to establish any connection with the card, as I knew they would.

So I went from naively trying to edit the downloaded info.py, to realising pip install must have created a copy somewhere (and compiled it?) to then trying pip uninstalling then reinstalling, to trying pip ‘upgrade’, to then trying pip forcing ‘no cache’. None of it made any difference and my edited info.py was never picked up – the original with hostname ‘Flashair’ stayed stubbornly intact whenever I ran the code.

Eventually, thanks to the debug messages, I found where pip had put the source code, deep in the library structure, and I just edited info.py there. I was afraid that pip might have constructed a checksum or the like when it did its ‘installation’ but seemingly not as the whole thing then sprang into life immediately! I'm sure that's very much frowned on, but so what.

So many thanks again but curses to pip for getting in the way and being so obscure (admittedly from the point of view of a complete beginner). Does it do anything useful apart from just copy files into the library, and then refuse to copy any newer versions for evermore?