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Neil: coping with a misconfigured server wasn't part of my
scenario; only coping with a client that simply doesn't have
a fqdn was. Some questions remain: (1) why can't we use
localhost.localdomain today? (2) Why is getfqdn() a hack?
(Apart from it being in the wrong module.)

Hm, I just thought of something. Why shouldn't gethostname()
be used as the default? Why bother with getfqdn() at all? At
least when gethostname() returms something inappropriate for
a particular server, it can be fixed locally by root by
fixing the hostname. (This may explain why you think
getfqdn() is a hack.)

Barry: an appropriate API could be to change the default for
local_hostname in __init__ to "localhost.localdomain" but to
leave the code that sticks in socket.getfqdn() (or maybe
just socket.gethostname()) if the value is explicitly given
as None or empty.