What's the point of Mise over ASDF or Aqua?

[airtonix]

So far having used asdf for many years my two main gripes are:

• that it doesn't work on windows.
• it doesn't help me protect against supply chain attacks by:
  • hash pinning my asdf plugins per project. (asdf-plugin-manager tries to address this but it's broken)
  • hash pinning the tool versions

So after using Mise for a couple weeks :

I love:

• it's friendly output
• it leans on the asdf plugin ecosystem

One thing that Mise does which I had always made a asdf wrapper for:

• it auto installs asdf plugins

but I now realise there's no real point to it because what we really need is:

• plugin system that works on bash/zsh/fish/ash/dash/powershell/nushell (basically it can't be based on shell scripting)
• SBOM to protect against supply chain attack
  • asdf-plugin-manager tried to do this, but there's a few issues with it.
  • asdf plugins themselves don't universally support gtisha, and lean on git tags which can be moved.

I have been keeping an eye on another Tool Manager called Aqua that solves all these problems.

We don't really need a task runner or a env manager. There are existing tools that solve these problems properly.

[mcallaway]

I'm pretty new to mise, and this question is how I discovered aqua, so I went over there to compare. Before that, however, I just wanted to comment to the original poster that I do want a task runner so that I don't need Makefiles, and I do want environment variable control. Looks like Windows support is coming to mise (or is already here, to some level). So perhaps hash pinning is your only missing feature?

By contrast aqua says one must use asdf for language support and I'm primarily interested in python. But I don't want two systems (aqua and asdf).

So it seems for me, mise is more feature complete. I went to ask what's the point of aqua. Not yet sure what I think overall.

[airtonix]

@mcallaway cant we link to the ticket tracking this statement?

Looks like Windows support is coming to mise

[jdx]

If aqua solves your problems then you should use aqua. I'm not very familiar with the project but my understanding is that it has more of a focus on security and reproducibility where I have more of a focus on ease-of-use and features.

I've moved mise away from being a simple asdf replacement and it now has support for running vfox plugins as well. I have not investigated this but I could see a backend being added to support aqua through mise—perhaps via a mise-aqua plugin. The problems I'm interested in are more to do with the front-end of dev tools over the back-end so leveraging work that others have done in that space may be useful.

[airtonix]

The vfox plugin support is a big step forward. ❤️

If you tackle the SBOM question, then mise becomes a very strong tool. Supply chain attack is a very real problem that too many people ignore (thus becoming a systemic issue).