I was right about one thing: it would’ve been easier to get Ruby talking to MySQL.

I gave up completely on HSQL and HToolkit when it became apparent that the damn thing simply wasn’t going to build, no matter how many -devel packages I made sure I had installed or configure options I tweaked. The last batch of compiler errors I bothered to read were Haskell type errors. Those aren’t going to be fixed by hunting for another half-dozen RPMs. Or if they are, it’s far from obvious which RPMs they’re going to be.

I might go back to it some time and plague the mailing lists with requests for help. The architecture looks interesting - there are low-level and mid-level interfaces to the GUI, on top of which various sophisticated high-levels could be built.

HaskellDB went a bit better. It would’ve been nice to have been told that you have to build wxHaskell with gtk2 and openGL support enabled (both configure options that don’t default that way) in order for HaskellDB to build. I got lucky and guessed that this was what needed to be done. So now it’s installed, and with any luck I’ll be able to connect some Haskell code to a real database (well, MySQL) any day now…