Address comments, improve checks

[rtonsing]

Address at least some of the comments.

Rearranged README to document all the pieces, needs much more work.

[Copilot]

Pull request overview

This PR refactors environment/config handling and adds stronger preflight checks to the host-update and git-pull utilities, with a small README update to reflect behavior.

Changes:

• Add .env loading and new/updated environment-variable validation in updatehosts.py and gitpull.py.
• Add an --update-gitpull mode and improve scp error handling/logging in updatehosts.py.
• Add source-repo accessibility checking and tweak destination path handling in gitpull.py; update README text accordingly.

Reviewed changes

Copilot reviewed 3 out of 3 changed files in this pull request and generated 5 comments.

File	Description
updatehosts.py	Adds .env loading, new required-env checks, and an --update-gitpull flow using scp.
gitpull.py	Adds .env loading, validates source repo with git ls-remote, adjusts origin/destination handling, and updates repo-cleanup behavior.
README.md	Updates behavior description regarding createdir behavior (but currently mismatched with actual CLI flag).

Comments suppressed due to low confidence (1)

gitpull.py:302

• target_path = Path(args.target_path).resolve() resolves ~ as a literal directory name (relative to CWD). This can cause the existence/creation check to operate on the wrong path, while destination later uses expanduser(). Use expanduser() before resolve() for target_path so validation/creation and destination are consistent.

    target_path = Path(args.target_path).resolve()
    if not target_path.exists() or not target_path.is_dir():
        if args.createdirs:
            # Create the target directory if it doesn't exist
            logger.info(f"Creating target directory: {target_path}")
            try:
                target_path.mkdir(parents=True, exist_ok=True)
            except Exception as e:

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