No idea about tools although I hope you find something.

Two related suggestions that will change your life:

1. Grunt Fund if you are making decisions about equity
2. Have people estimate the total time for a task, rigidly enforce that every man-hour spent on a project has to be allocated to one of those tasks (including the elusive but vital “oh shit we forgot” task), keep track of the coefficient between the two. It’ll be different for different people sometimes. When estimating a project, have people come up with estimates and then multiply by the coefficient. Be transparent with everyone about this system. It’ll revolutionize your project management life once people get used to it. I tried to find a blog post which explains more detail, but honestly, it’s not complicated, and Google is too shit now to find it.

Are you saying I was being silly?

You might be onto something

Okay, so way back when, Google needed a way to install and administer 500 new instances of whatever web service they had going on without it being a nightmare. So they made a little tool to make it easier to spin up random new stuff easily and scriptably.

So then the whole rest of the world said “Hey Google’s doing that and they’re super smart, we should do that too.” So they did. They made Docker, and for some reason that involved Y Combinator giving someone millions of dollars for reasons I don’t really understand.

So anyway, once Docker existed, nobody except Google and maybe like 50 other tech companies actually needed to do anything that it was useful for (and 48 out of those 50 are too addled by layoffs and nepotism to actually use Borg / K8s/ Docker (don’t worry they’re all the the same thing) for its intended purpose.) They just use it so their tech leads can have conversations at conferences and lunches where they make it out like anyone who’s not using Docker must be an idiot, which is the primary purpose for technology as far as they’re concerned.

But anyway in the meantime a bunch of FOSS software authors said “Hey this is pretty convenient, if I put a setup script inside a Dockerfile I can literally put whatever crazy bullshit I want into it, like 20 times more than even the most certifiably insane person would ever put up with in a list of setup instructions, and also I can pull in 50 gigs of dependencies if I want to of which 2,421 have critical security vulnerabilities and no one will see because they’ll just hit the button and make it go.”

And so now everyone uses Docker and it’s a pain in the ass to make any edits to the configuration or setup and it’s all in this weird virtualized box, and the “from scratch” instructions are usually out of date.

The end

Are you comfortable running a little python script to do it? I’ve done something like this for myself for exactly the same reason, I could polish it up and show you and you could use it locally for yourself.

I know it’s only vaguely related, since they’re not US-funded, but at some point I think it would be hilarious (in a particularly poignant way) if the Lemmy developers’ funding got cut off by the process of the explicitly rabid governments they are fans of finally succeeding at destabilizing the friendly Western countries where they live to the point that NLNet wasn’t funded anymore. As I understand it, NLNet is already facing some headwinds because the friendly liberal elements in EU politics are getting replaced by the same kind of “fuck everyone just give money to rich people and also anyone who disagrees with me dies” elements that Russia likes to give money and social-media-shilling campaigns to support.

Surely Russia and China will jump to the front and fund basic infrastructure work for the good of everyone, if that happened. They could count on it happening, instead of having to get jobs.

Surely.