mpd widget doesn't work when fish is set as the default login shell.

[TheReverend403]

No errors, just no output from the mpd widget, and no notifications. All other widgets that use the shell work fine.

[lcpz]

Tell me the exact steps to reproduce this.

[TheReverend403]

• Install http://fishshell.com/
• Set it as your default shell with chsh -s /bin/fish, then relogin. Alternatively, use xephyr with the environment variable SHELL set to /bin/fish, it seems to work just as well. You should probably do this as a preferred method, because depending on how you launch X, your startup scripts like xinit may also be incompatible with fish without some tweaks.
• Observe how the MPD widget doesn't do anything.

As a sidenote, certain other things are not fish compatible, such as run_once(). I already have a workaround for that, and if you need it, I can make a PR for it.

[TheReverend403]

Also of interest is that I can run the exact curl command used in mpd.lua manually, and it produces expected output. I suspect the issue may be in asyncshell, but I haven't been able to produce any results from modifying it.

[TheReverend403]

Here we go, I figured out how to get Awesome's stdout.

Thunar: D-BUS name org.xfce.Thunar already registered.
Flag 0x0001, status 0, EXIT 1 STAT 0
fish: Could not expand string “"asyncshell.deliver(1, [[\"$(echo 'password 
status
currentsong
close' | curl --connect-timeout 1 -fsm 3 telnet://127.0.0.1:6600)\"]])"”
Standard input: echo "asyncshell.deliver(1, [[\"$(echo 'password 
                     ^

fish: Could not expand string “"asyncshell.deliver(2, [[\"$(echo 'password 
status
currentsong
close' | curl --connect-timeout 1 -fsm 3 telnet://127.0.0.1:6600)\"]])"”
Standard input: echo "asyncshell.deliver(2, [[\"$(echo 'password 
                     ^
fish: Could not expand string “"asyncshell.deliver(3, [[\"$(echo 'password 
status
currentsong
close' | curl --connect-timeout 1 -fsm 3 telnet://127.0.0.1:6600)\"]])"”
Standard input: echo "asyncshell.deliver(3, [[\"$(echo 'password 
                     ^
fish: Could not expand string “"asyncshell.deliver(4, [[\"$(echo 'password 
status
currentsong
close' | curl --connect-timeout 1 -fsm 3 telnet://127.0.0.1:6600)\"]])"”
Standard input: echo "asyncshell.deliver(4, [[\"$(echo 'password

[TheReverend403]

OK, adding awful.util.shell = '/bin/sh' after line 15 of asyncshell.lua fixes it. Is this an acceptable workaround for compatibility across multiple shells?

[lcpz]

Yes.

[unode]

Keep in mind that /bin/sh may still be a different shell (usually bash or dash) depending on the system.

Some incompatibilities may still show up in some cases.

[lcpz]

For those special cases, I wrote a line in the widgets section.