[kaba0]

> just continually throw away old versions in nixpkgs head

It is simply completely infeasible to store and build every version of every package.

While it is not user friendly to find a package’s version X, it is either just overriding the version field and the hash, or referencing another version of the nixpkgs tree and building the same package from there.

It’s not trivial with other package managers either, and on top you can easily get into inconsistent states with those — nix can handle any version of any software correctly.

[jljljl]

I don't think the answer is to have every version at the nixpkg head, for exactly the reasons you mentioned.

But I do think there's a search issue where mapping the version field of a package to the commit hash or nixpkgs version is not trivial or user-friendly, especially for multiple packages.