I was going to reply to ikegami's posting that "surely somebody had done something like this before", and you had! I don't know how I missed the module on search.cpan.org when searching on the word 'exporter'. It pops up blinking now.

It looks like the syntax

use Exporter::Easiest q(
    :hdr_lens => LIS_TIF_HDR_LEN   LIS_TIF_HDR_DATA_MAX    
                 LIS_PHY_HDR_LEN     LIS_LR_HDR_LEN  
    :phyhdr_flags => . . . . 
    :lr_types     => . . . .
         . . . .
    :all => :hdr_lens :phyhdr_flags :lr_types . . . .
);
[download]

would have gotten me what I wanted. And I like the idea of automatically doing the "use vars" on mentioned variables. Thanks!