Hey all,
Following a brief chat in IRC, I've proposed[0] adding curl to the list of PHP extensions required by MediaWiki, and Chad thought it'd be a good idea to get wider thoughts before merging.
Right now we have some features that require curl (it's probably the #2 issue third parties have with installing VisualEditor, for instance, after mis-matched versions).
We already require mbstring (as discussed in March) alongside xml, ctype, json, and iconv. If you have an opinion, please weigh in on the task.[1]
[0] - https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/294259/ [1] - https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T137926
J.