Aye he also said he was not the maintainer (he does not control when and if the structure will change).

Here's one approach that I'd likely take
$ perl Makefile.PL
Downloading the files ... success
Parsing .... success
Generating module (inlining those big hashes) .... success
Writing makefile ...
$ make ... $ make test ...

I agree he needs to prompt the user, but your example only shows a status as it actually tries to connect out -- or is there a prompt there that I am missing? My point was that he would need to make an option for it to auto download, not just blindly do it.

I would put a separate script in his distro that 1, downloads the file to the correct location, 2 checks to see if the structure is correct. Add this to the install readme with instructions on how to setup a cronjob to update monthly etc.