So basically you're saying curl is a dependency of other packages and it's failing to build due to the tests? That makes it more complicated. You could always try renaming it to "curl.scm" and testing it, but I'm failry certain it won't work.
Again, I'm really not sure if my way is the best way. I'm still learning a lot myself and making new packages that inherit existing packages is just a neat trick I've used myself and thought it could help you. So the best answer I could give to your predicament is to just keep using the same trick. Find out what package is pulling in "curl" as a dependency and then define a new package for that one (using the same trick) and override its "curl" input with "my-curl" Although it seems like this can get very ugly very quickly, so I'm also curious now if anyone else knows a better way to handle this. It's almost as if you need to make "curl" a global (and then modify it) so that all packages will use your modified curl instead of the one they pull in from use-modules. I'm not sure.