Thank you!

We're planning a longer post that explains the architecture and process of building the index. An extremely basic description of what we do can be found here: https://www.jetpack.io/blog/0-5-0-install-nix-packages-by-ve...

  First, we processed build outputs from Hydra to map package names + version numbers to commits in the Nixpkgs repo. We then created a service that stores this index as a prefix tree, making it easy to search for a specific package and version in Nix.

There's some extra cleanup required to make the index really usable, which we'll share in the follow up post

For the merged packages -- we have a hardcoded "canonical names", which map the various attribute paths like `nodejs_20` and `nodejs_18` to a single, easier to search name (like `nodejs`). We originally designed this so that Devbox users (who may not be familiar with Nix naming conventions) can just type `devbox add nodejs@20` and get the right package version.