MPDStats Shell Parameters --host crashes the Application: AttributeError: 'str' object has no attribute 'decode'. Did you mean: 'encode'?

[ss2]

I noticed that the plugin mpdstats has problems accepting shell
parameters while invoking. Passing the parameter --host=HOST will
crash the application:

[user@HOST ~]$ beet -vv -p mpdstats mpdstats --host=localhost
no user configuration found at /home/user/.config/beets/config.yaml
data directory: /home/user/.config/beets
plugin paths:
Sending event: pluginload
library database: /home/user/.config/beets/library.db
library directory: /home/user/Music
Sending event: library_opened
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/beet", line 8, in <module>
    sys.exit(main())
             ^^^^^^
  File "/usr/lib/python3.12/site-packages/beets/ui/__init__.py", line 1865, in main
    _raw_main(args)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.12/site-packages/beets/ui/__init__.py", line 1852, in _raw_main
    subcommand.func(lib, suboptions, subargs)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.12/site-packages/beetsplug/mpdstats.py", line 371, in func
    mpd_config["host"] = opts.host.decode("utf-8")
                         ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
AttributeError: 'str' object has no attribute 'decode'. Did you mean: 'encode'?

If I put the parameters for this plugin into config.yml, then beets
will load the plugin just fine. But a mixture probably is not a good
idea. I thought, I'd pass the hostname to config.yml and the port
number through the CLI to bypass this error. Then I get the following
effect:

First the config:

plugins: mpdstats
mpd:
  host: somehost

The Result:

[user@HOST beets]$ beet -vv -p mpdstats mpdstats --port=5000
user configuration: /home/user/.config/beets/config.yaml
data directory: /home/user/.config/beets
plugin paths:
Sending event: pluginload
library database: /home/user/.config/beets/library.db
library directory: /home/user/Music
Sending event: library_opened
mpdstats: music_directory: /home/user/Music
mpdstats: strip_path: /
configuration error: mpd.host: must be a string

I observe this behavior in v1.6.0 and v2.0.0.

Setup

• OS: Arch Linux
• Python version: 3.12.5
• beets version: 2.0.0
• Turning off plugins made problem go away: Beets is
  configured with just the one plugin.

I'm surprised about the version reported by beets itself:

[user@HOST beets]$ pacman -Qs beets
local/beets 2.0.0-1
    Flexible music library manager and tagger
[user@HOST beets]$ beet --version
beets version 1.6.1
Python version 3.12.5
plugins: mpdstats

My configuration (output of beet config) is:

# --------------- Plugins ---------------

plugins: mpdstats
mpd:
    host: somehost
    music_directory: /home/user/Music
    strip_path: ''
    rating: yes
    rating_mix: 0.75
    port: 6600
    password: REDACTED

[bal-e]

If beet --version looks wrong, check which beet -- maybe you have a local Pip-based installation that is overriding the system-wide installation.

[bal-e]

Okay, that's actually a weird bug in itself. The Arch Linux beets package fetches the commit tagged v2.0.0, which is commit b88c09720c3f0782b90f83df74e65680c050392f. Within that commit, the __init__.py specifies version 1.6.1 instead of 2.0.0. @snejus do you know about this?