I went spelunking through my own public repo nxv and remembered why it exists: sometimes you don’t need “latest.” You need the exact version that existed in nixpkgs at some specific point in time.
nxv indexes years of nixpkgs git history and answers the annoying questions quickly: when a package was added, which versions existed, and which commit to pin for nix shell nixpkgs/<commit>#pkg. Under the hood it’s SQLite (FTS5) plus a Bloom filter, which means fast searches and even faster “definitely not found.”
It runs as a CLI, an HTTP API server with a web UI, and even ships as a NixOS module. Archaeology is a poor use of compute.