I’m starting to work on a project the elk stack (elasticsearch, logstash, and kibana). To begin with, I’m looking at updating the existing elk related packages in nixpkgs unstable but I am new to package maintenance and only have several months experience with nix. I’m wondering if anyone can help me with the following question(s) or point me in the right direction.
Many of the related packages have started to go stale (kibana was actually removed late last year due to lack of maintenance) and the latest version they are on is behind by a major version number, although it is still barely within support by the official vendor.
With that in mind, my inclination is to do away with having separate packages for each major, as is currently the case, (e.g. elasticsearch7, elasticsearch6) and simply refactor it to an unversioned package that can be updated to whatever the latest release is.
Given how stale the packages it seems like a good opportunity clean it up, while also making maintanence a bit more convenient in the future. Are there any precedents set for this sort of situation with other packages? Any advice on how to approach this?