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?