kids cannot participate (was Re: WSJ)

[Albert Cahalan]

Yoshiki Ohshima writes:

> And, I see that one of the biggest downside of our software is that
> kids cannot participate the software development effort from their
> laptops (except...).  If we are to look at different platforms, it is
> nice to think about easy support of on-laptop-development.  I don't
> care if it is on Windows or Mac OS; on top of Windows (or Mac OS), you
> as an end-user can still do a lot.  (Basically the same argument in
> "filtered Internet access is better than no Internet access".)

The fix is simple.

At bare minimum, the build process should ensure that all the various
*-devel RPMs can be installed. Right now they do not all install.
I'm unable to get SDL-Pango and librsvg. Just a few days ago we were
missing libX11 and even gcc itself.

Note that a **very** complete development environment is only 9 MB.
That includes the C compiler, all the standard header files, and
even the odds and ends like libSDL. It's a crying shame that the
laptop includes every impractical sandboxed toy out of academia,
but fails to include **the** systems programming language. All of
the important things are written in C, including Python!