Rogan,
Thanks for taking a look at it. No, mtl is not the problem, at least not yet.
A detail that I've discovered is important: I'm on Mac OS X (10.6). readline is my problem, and readline + mac + haskell seems to be a bad mix.
Macports installs readline in /opt/local/ by default, so I discovered I needed to install this way:
cabal install lambdabot --configure-option=--with-readline-includes="/opt/local/include" --configure-option=--with-readline-libraries="/opt/local/lib"
That got the readline dependency installed correctly, but then the lambdabot build complained about the architecture (32- vs 64-bit). This
thread was somewhat helpful. I reinstalled readline via macports with the universal flag and got past that error.
Now I'm stuck on readline again [lambdabot build step 28 of 81]:
"/Users/joe/.cabal/lib/readline-1.0.1.0/ghc-6.12.3/HSreadline-1.0.1.0.o: unknown symbol `_rl_basic_quote_characters'"
What do I do with that?