Broken Debugger on OS X Sierra

Folks,

I recently upgraded to OS X Sierra and have run into a problem with the
debugger. I don't think it's a bug in NetBeans, but want to report is here,
see if anyone else has run into it, and see if there's a better solution.

First, the problem is that we have a custom debugger, which boots and runs
Java Bytecode. Our debug launcher looks like this:

//typical connector
LaunchingConnector connector =
Bootstrap.virtualMachineManager().defaultConnector();

//all the flags
Map map = connector.defaultArguments();
Connector.Argument mainArg = (Connector.Argument) map.get("main");
mainArg.setValue("-jar \"" + executable + "\"");
Connector.Argument optionsArg = (Connector.Argument) map.get("options");
optionsArg.setValue("-Duser.dir=\"" + workingDirectory + "\"");

//launch the VM
try {
    virtualMachine = connector.launch(map);
} catch (IOException | IllegalConnectorArgumentsException |
VMStartException ex) {
    Logger.getLogger(JDIDebugger.class.getName()).log(Level.SEVERE, null,
ex);
}

Nothing special here, just bootup a JVM and run it with debug settings.
This translates to a command that looks something like this on my machine:

/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk1.8.0_102.jdk/Contents/Home/jre/bin/java
-Duser.dir=/Users/stefika/Repositories/quorum-language/Quorum3 -Xdebug
-Xrunjdwp:transport=dt_socket,address=CSadmins-MacBook-Pro-3.local:63636,suspend=y
-jar /Users/stefika/Repositories/quorum-language/Quorum3/Run/Default.jar

Again, nothing special here. However, after upgrading to Sierra, I was
getting this error (key problem in bold):
ERROR: transport error 202: *gethostbyname: unknown host*
ERROR: JDWP Transport dt_socket failed to initialize, TRANSPORT_INIT(510)
JDWP exit error AGENT_ERROR_TRANSPORT_INIT(197): No transports initialized
[debugInit.c:750]
FATAL ERROR in native method: JDWP No transports initialized,
jvmtiError=AGENT_ERROR_TRANSPORT_INIT(197)
Abort trap: 6

Unknown host tells me it's not connecting. This means my machine's name,
which happens to be CSadmins-MacBook-Pro-3.local, isn't in the /etc/hosts
file on my Mac. Now, that's easy to fix by adding a loopback entry to the
hosts file, but here's what I don't get:

*Questions*:

1. Why is this necessary on OS X Sierra, but not the previous release?

2. I'm a little worried this is going to break for others using our stuff
in deployment. Is there anything I should change about my connector? The
Map entry doesn't contain a dt_socket command. Should I add one manually to
the map or is that bad?

3. The Java debugger doesn't appear to have this problem. For local runs,
should I be doing something different?

I hope that explains the problem. Obviously, I'd like to avoid users having
to mess with this file, if possible.

Stefik