External binaries for themes: good idea or bad?

support
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https://github.com/mathuin/androidapps is a project of mine which was written to replace a Django app. It works, after a fashion. It can take an Android APK, extract branding information like icons and names, generate a QR code, and store all that jazz where it can be made available on the web. It’s the next generation for http://androidapps.twilley.org/ sad though it looks. :slightly_smiling:

I want to replace the website above with Hugo and a custom theme, which when served with an APK generates the same QR code and copies the files into the static directory of the site and populates a new “post” which will contain the descriptions and recent changes. This is totally doable, if I can use an external binary (the core of the androidapps code) to do most of the things. Is this a good idea, with regard to sharing the theme with others? Are there other themes which have external binaries? How do they handle this? I’m looking forward to learning how others do this sort of thing. Thanks!

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If you can do it with your web server, then you can do so with a theme.

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I could only do it with my web server because I wrote it into the web server’s code.

I don’t think adding my functionality is a good enough reason to fork hugo. :laughing:

If I were going to add a binary to a theme, where’s the canonical location?

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Don’t know if there’s a canon for this, but I’d expect a binary to be in bin/.

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To answer your original question: it is a good idea. There are many things that are easier to do that way.

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