Fatal error when installing Drupal on servers that don't have the cURL extension

Problem/Motivation

I encountered this error running install.php on a Ubuntu 12.04 web server.

[Thu May 09 13:16:47 2013] [error] [client 10.10.10.10] PHP Fatal error:  Call to undefined function Guzzle\\Http\\Curl\\curl_multi_init() in /var/www/mysite.org/drupal/core/vendor/guzzle/http/Guzzle/Http/Curl/CurlMulti.php on line 632, referer: http://mysite.org/drupal/core/install.php?langcode=en&profile=spark

Proposed resolution

This was resolved by installing the Ubuntu package php5-curl.

I'm filing a bug report because I hope this could be resolved for future users that run into this missing dependency by 1) dependency injection, 2) a check/warning during the install.php "Verify Requirements" steps, and/or 3) documentation at System Requirements.

Remaining tasks

• Inject php5-curl dependency or add dependency check to install.php "Verify Requirements" step

edit: This is probably applicable upstream to D8-dev project (or already resolved there?).