blogdown vs hugodown

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I have been thinking about starting a blogdown blog for a while, but haven't gotten around to it because I want to make sure I properly test it first. Once you start, it's not trivial to switch platforms.

Now I found hugodown, which is "similar to blogdown, but is focussed purely on Hugo websites". It looks intriguing since it sounds like a move towards the "do one thing well" philosophy (just knit and let Hugo do the HTML). Compared to blogdown, the top bullet is:

It only re-runs your R code when you explicitly ask for it (by knitting the post). This makes hugodown considerably easier to use for long-running blogs and blogs with multiple contributors.

However, according to the blogdown docs:

There is a caching mechanism to speed up building your website: an Rmd file will not be recompiled when its *.html output file is newer (in terms of file modification time).

Now I am confused. If blogdown doesn't re-run old posts, then why does hugodown imply that it does? What am I missing here?

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The caching mechanism in blogdown could fail in certain cases. I haven't experienced this by myself, but I have heard from other people that when you git clone or git checkout a repo, the modification times of files are not guaranteed to be preserved, so the .html file could end up being older than .Rmd, which leads to the unnecessary recompilation of .Rmd.

Anyway, with the current CRAN version of blogdown, this is no longer a problem. The top bullet in the comparison is no longer valid. There have been a lot of changes and improvements in blogdown recently, and you may read the NEWS file for more info: https://github.com/rstudio/blogdown/blob/master/NEWS.md

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