lol well it wasnt quite like that. historically in the pvr addon side, we grabbed the host name when on windows and used the IP address when not. Whilst making other changes I saw this and knowing that the get_hostname() call is cross platform figured "what harm could it do" to start using hostname from non windows boxes as well. And it was only after doing all that and getting the changes officially included in XBMC 13.2 Beta 2 that we then realised that many devices such as android phones/boxes and raspberry pi's actually have generic/identical hostnames. But it is quite time consuming to get changes into XBMC official releases so I really couldnt fix it on the client side, but luckily can do some trickery in ServerWMC along the lines of "if i see clients with the same hostname but different IP address generate a new hostname alias to identify them uniquely". I actually coded the fix weeks ago (ie the day after I realised the problem Id caused) but we havent done another ServerWMC release since we dont have many things to release.
There has actually been 1 user who ran into the problem (2 raspberry pi's with same hostname and stealing eachothers tuners/livestreams etc) and now this thread where the client restrictions dont work
Infact this thread reminding me about client restrictions makes me realise that the way ive done the host name aliasing when duplicates are encountered isnt going to always work with client restrictions, since the aliases arent deterministic and could be different each time ServerWMC is restarted, depending on which duplicate named client talks to it first! I originally was just going to append the IP address to the hostname (eg localhost-192.168.1.129) but we thought that was a bit long and ugly so i then went with a "localhost1" "localhost2" etc method. But as I say, the first client to talk to ServerWMC is localhost, then the next is localhost2, so if you setup restrictions on localhost2 that could actually be either of the 2 boxes depending on what order they first communicate with ServerWMC after a restart.
Argh
So actually, there was no good reason for making this change really (except an innate belief that a hostname should be unique) and I infact regret having done it!
But thanks for the compliment anyhow