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> A bug fix applied to the most recent version doesn't automatically affect packages depending on it, so all of them need to be updated too now.

This is untrue. Everytime that a package is updated, thanks to NixOS declarative build system, all packages that depend on it are also rebuild/updated. Unless you're pinning your derivations, it works even on custom packages created by you.

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That makes sense, but every pinned package contributes to the packaging burden. In order to reduce the burden to what traditional distributions have to deal with, pinning would have to be disallowed, which now resembles the traditional approach a lot, with one version per package.

Well, most packages does not pin dependencies. From the top of my head, proprietary packages generally pin dependencies, however in this case it is because proprietary packages are known to broke when a random library updates.

When I was referring to pinning, it is mostly done locally. I do sometimes, for example, pinning a specific package to a specific commit of Nixpkgs, so I can either backport a new version or avoid some change that I don't want to deal at the moment.

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