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Comment by nindalf | Hacker News Reader

I don’t understand these complaints about breakages. Download Hugo. Generate your site. Now use that Hugo binary till the end of eternity. The Hugo project might add, deprecate or remove features but that won’t affect you in any way. Your binary will continue to work till the end of time. (Assuming we still have x86 or ARM computers available)

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> Download Hugo.

Never tried hugo, but it surely must be cleaner than jekyll. As a matter of policy I prefer to install tools packaged by my distribution. For debian, the jekyll package went through several "engines" and whatnot along the years, and each change broke the build. For some reason it even needed particular python versions, even if it is written in ruby. A complete nightmare. I honestly lost faith in static site generators after the experience with jekyll. Even if hugo is saner, it is still amenable to breaking as its debian package evolves, and I don't want to deal with that.

If you care about breakage, don't rely on a package manager that will constantly change the package version. Grab the binary from the Github releases page and use it in perpetuity.

> If you care about breakage, don't rely on a package manager that will constantly change the package version.

I do care about breakage of my C, C++ and Fortran programs, and I would be very surprised if updating gcc broke their build (unless using -Werror). Why can't static site generators, which are arguably much simpler than compilers, have the basic property of not breaking sites?

Hugo has no dependency (or rather they'd baked into the single binary), it's just a binary and even runs on my shared hosting. It's the only reason I switched from Jekyll. I had so much trouble with Jekyll breaking it was unbearable. Zola is another option.

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