kids cannot participate (was Re: WSJ)

[Yoshiki Ohshima]

> > 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.

  Cool.

> 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.

  Wow.  That is almost too good to believe.  I did install gcc while
ago (and tried it now as well) and compiled some stuff.  "yum install
gcc" downloads 8.5MB of files (extracted files would be bigger on
disk), and "make" command is about 0.5MB.  Other stuff such as X11
headers, etc., etc. were not included in "odds and ends"?  How much
disk space do you think we need for making, for example, a .xo file
for a simple app?  The svn and git clients are not a part of a
"complete development environment?

>  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!

  Even if it will be additional 50MB or such, it is just equivalent of
dozens of high-res pictures.  Yes, it would be nice to have an easy
install of a "complete development environment" for XO on XO.
(Too bad the development of Develop is stalled.)

-- Yoshiki

  I don't understand what you are implying in this paragraph ("every",
"impractical", "sandboxed", "toy", and "out of academica"....  Some
words may apply to some activities we have, but connecting them
together doesn't make a meaningful sentense), but yes, it is a shame
that most of developers even don't try to develop their software on
it.