Multithreading in Awesome

[Alexander Yakushev]

So here's my problem. I use a weather widget that fetches the data from 
a shell script via io.popen. It works great while I'm connected to the 
Internet but if I'm not it just freezes the entire WM. That's because 
the shell script itself doesn't print out anything and stays awaiting if 
it can't connect to the server. "ping" command also works like this, so 
I can't check if the system is online using it.
If I am missing some other way to solve the problem then point me at it. 
Otherwise I see the only solution is to use some multithreading library 
to run IO requests asynchronously. Of course I can install library like 
that myself but I think that such facility could be useful for many 
users who want to extend their Awesome, and to the widget writers who 
could rely on it instead of distributing their widgets with such 
libraries themselves.
So what do you think? Could a distant Awesome release contain a library 
like Lua Lanes (http://kotisivu.dnainternet.net/askok/bin/lanes/) or 
something similar?

Regards,
Alexander
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