Jesper’s IPTables::libiptc is a perl module which allow you to modify Netfilter rules from Perl. He’s the maintener and this is available on CPAN. It currently supports up-to iptables 1.4.10 (version 0.51 of IPTables::libiptc).
It dynamically load xtables.so and libiptc.so to access to iptables feature. It is fast as it does not suffer of iptables limitation (which is running modification one by one). Performance are quite good: it takes only 16 sec to generate and implement a 80000 rules ruleset (which is quite good compare to the 42h hours that would be take by direct iptables calls)
Jesper would like to have a complete iptables lib to access to all function and in particular to the do_command() function. One interesting things for him would be to have access to the test command.
Pablo don’t want the team to guarantee the libiptc will not break API or ABI. As it is already exported, it is not possible to make it private again. As the part Jesper is interested in is linked with user command, there should not be API break. Thus exporting the function seems OK.
Next work, Jesper wish to do is to publish a wrapper module IPTables::Interface and moving this to CPAN maybe inside the IPTables::libiptc module.