Yes, the opam repository has recently been working on an archival policy to reduce the size of the checkout and hopefully ease pressure on the dependency resolver by pruning 'obviously' wrong choices. However, the heuristic they chose seems to have mainly assumed that the things in the repository are libraries, and used dependencies for tracking usages. For executables like dune, this is obviously the wrong idea, and I think they're still deciding how to proceed while adding back most versions

It is still there according to "opam show dune --all-versions", so no, it has not been removed.

Anyways, what you could do is:

  opam pin add dune 3.7.0
  opam install dune

Alternatively, you can use the tarball directly:

  opam pin add dune https://github.com/ocaml/dune/releases/download/3.7.0/dune-3.7.0.tbz

I tried going back to change my Dockerfile to see if that would work, and it did not:

  RUN eval $(opam env) && opam pin add dune 3.7.0 && opam install --yes dune

Similar error to before:

  [ERROR] Package dune has no known version 3.7.0 in the repositories

You're right that I could change it to grab directly from GitHub, but at that point I can also just change it to a different version of Dune, as I said above. None of this negates my original point.

What if you do "opam update" before?

I already do: https://github.com/gradbench/gradbench/blob/0276272d0df5be19...

And the CI build doesn't use Docker caching, so no shenanigans there.

Actually, I did an "opam update" (after my comment that stated there was "3.7.0") and "opam show dune --all-versions" no longer shows "3.7.0". :|

It shows:

  all-versions         1.6.3  1.9.3  1.11.4  2.3.0  2.4.0  2.5.1  2.6.1  2.7.1
                       2.9.3  3.5.0  3.6.2  3.10.0  3.12.1  3.12.2  3.15.3
                       3.17.2  3.18.2  3.19.0  3.19.1

You are right! So I suppose it is either 3.6.2 or 3.10.0. Can you use either of these versions?

Your alternative really is:

  $ opam pin add dune https://github.com/ocaml/dune/releases/download/3.7.0/dune-3.7.0.tbz

If you really must need "3.7.0".

Just FWIW, maybe it might work the way you wanted it to if you do not update the registry; worth a try. It should be able to fetch the correct tarball.