@dhirschfeld - I think you might want to see this script, given your message at Quansight-Labs/czi-conda-forge-mgmt#5 (comment)!

Nice, especially the correct handling of the patches 🚀

One minor quibble would be that the timestamp in question is the build time (IIUC) and not the time that the package was uploaded to the package registry (i.e. not the time that it was available for users to download/install). Though, with automated build infrastructure the build time is probably a close-enough proxy for the uploaded_timestamp.

The only other observation is that this is an enormous amount of effort (development/CPU) to go to to support something as simple as

select *
from packages 
where
    package_name = ?
    and upload_timestamp < ?

...if the package information was stored in a database rather than a JSON blob.

i.e. I think the JSON blob format is much more complex and must be much less performant than storing the information in a proper database.

That's just my intuition, and might well be wrong, but is why I was interested in the other PR.