Why hasn't it been standardized? This section was triggered by this HN comment:
Also for searching packages I always end up looking on the website. Using the built-in search you have to do some weird incantations that aren't easy to remember and you still don't get the full list of packages that are related.
It also doesn't help that the package names are random. There's no standard format it seems: gcc 9 is "gcc9" while clang 9 is "clang_9". Why not have packages be ..<major[.minor[.build]]> or any other standard convention.
Then you could also say you want a certain version of a package instead of having a name for each. Or a minimum version.
Maybe we need a wrapper around nix that exposes a user friendly interface.
See ongoing discussions in the topic: