Now I cannot even build Phobos without libcurl.
I'm sorry, but this is insane.
I use curl with D professionally every day, and I just don't think curl is anywhere near mature enough to be in a standard library.
The implementation in Phobos seems very naive, and seems unaware of the shortcomings of curl. For example, curl can't handle a user name with a colon in it. (Some of our clients do indeed have user names with colons in them). We've found some very nasty bugs in its support for simultaneous downloads. It behaves badly with certain types of FTP servers. Etc.
Including it in Phobos implies a level of support that we cannot possibly provide.
Can we please move this into Deimos where it belongs?