I found a couple more problems getting this running.  
First, the build stopped complaining that curses could not be found.
This was not tested for in the configure script.
Since I had ncurses installed, I modified one of the files
so that it would be used instead.

The second problem had to do with readline again.
The build stopped, complaining that it couldn't find readline.a.
I had set up a configuration argument so that the readline
that came with MySQL would be used, and that's where
the makefile was looking for it.   After scratching my head a bit,
I went into the directory, and ran bmake, and this created readline.a.
I don't know why it was not created before this.