Hey, maybe we will finally start bundling curl (there is a years-old ticket about this, and someone already laid out the autotools changes to do it).
I have been building MacPorts against a custom libcurl on most systems 10.10 and older for years and years. It's trivially simple to do, but to make it easy and resilient I keep a "default" MacPorts installed in /opt/bootstrap and install curl in that, then use that for the primary MP in /opt/local.
