alt Hacker NewsNix UX really sucks I agree with that. But it has a very robust core model and is reproducible from the bottom up. Tools like asdf, renv etc. just provide you some binaries. If you need some system libraries installed they don't help with that for example.
Can one provide reproducible dev environment that uses a tool that is not yet in mise registry? Or does one need to wait it to be added into the registry? Also if I want to provide a python runtime that is compiled slightly differently can I do that? Or does it have to be distributed as a precompiled binary?
> that uses a tool that is not yet in mise registry
Yes, you can directly get tools from npm/pypi/cargo/github-releases/asdf-plugins/vfox-plugins without anyone touching the mise registry. The registry is just a convenient index of short names e.g. "[email protected]" maps to ubi:junegunn/[email protected] which will download the appropriate arch binary from the v0.56.3 junegunn/fzf GitHub release.
> if I want to provide a python runtime that is compiled slightly differently
The default uses precompiled binaries, but with one setting it can use python-build/pyenv under the hood, then all the pyenv env vars can be used to configure the build process.