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Gerty is a robot character in Duncan Jones' "Moon", with Kevin Spacey's voice :)

Gerty is a codename for a new project that would replace RANCID -- a software package for retrieving router and backing up configurations.

RANCID is a pretty painful piece of code if you start modifying and troubleshooting it. Also adding support for new device types or new command output is quite a frustrating experience.

Gerty requirements:

1. well-designed. No code repetitions, clear modular structure, as much as possible configurable
2. pluggable. Allow to add new modules without changing the distribution source
3. not Cisco-centric. All vendors are treated equally
4. device configurations and output from other "show" commands is stored separately. The user is free to define new "show" command reports and store them separately at their wish.
5. support for multi-line commands (conf t, show something, exit -- quite typical sequence on some non-cisco vendor equipment)
6. built-in dispatcher for parallel execution
7. source code published in a Git repository, so that branching and merging is easy and painless