Best practice for updating Hugo academic theme installed with install_hugo()

Question

Since I did not use git clone to install the Hugo academic theme with R blogdown, and since I use my own git repository to manage the entire blogdown directory structure (which includes theme) it seems to be complicated to use git to update the academic theme as discussed here. What is the best approach for updating the academic theme on an existing R blogdown structure?

Answer 1

Personally I'd recommend not to update a Hugo theme unless you run into theme bugs or see new features in the newer version of the theme that you really need. It is kind of unpredictable what will happen if you update a theme. That said, I use git submodules to manage Hugo themes myself (and I don't update the submodule unless I really need a newer version). There is more information about this in the Appendix D.7 of the blogdown book.