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Comment by I_am_tiberius | Hacker News Reader

I've never used nixos so excuse this question: What is the difference between nixhub and the package search on https://search.nixos.org/packages ?

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https://search.nixos.org/packages only shows packages that are available on the latest stable and unstable releases of Nixpkgs. The means they only have a limited number of versions for a given package available. For example, Python on unstable only has 5 versions to choose from:

  - 2.7.18
  - 3.9.17
  - 3.8.17 
  - 3.11.4
  - 3.12.0b3

If you need something different, you need to find a specific commit of the NixOS/nixpkgs repo that has that version. This information is not indexed or searchable on the official package search. Nixhub.io provides an index of these older released commits, so you can find and install versions that aren't available in the latest Nix releases.

If you visit https://www.nixhub.io/packages/python, you can see we have a lot more versions available. Developers can use the Nix or Devbox references on that page to install the version they need.

Why is it necessary to have two platforms then? https://search.nixos.org/packages could just add older packages as well, right?

I suppose they could, but for various reasons they haven’t.

We originally built this for Devbox users because it was a common request, and realized that it could help Nix users as well.

From a short look I see it uses devbox in the install instructions as opposed to nix-shell

Probably a polished design to promote devbox

nixhub has the historical versions of a package, which you cannot get via nixos.org.

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