kids cannot participate (was Re: WSJ)

[Bernardo Innocenti]

Albert Cahalan wrote:

> 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.

These were just bugs caused by people not uploading all their RPMs
to the ~/public_rpms/ directories.  In some cases, source RPMs and
debuginfo RPMs may be missing too.

These problems will be fixed once we complete the migration
of all our packages into the Fedora package repository and
build them with Koji.  Dennis is working on it.


> 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.

I believe compiling large C programs with optimizations turned on
is not even possible without adding some swap space.


> 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!

Does the laptop really have to include development tools on the
precious internal flash?  Only a kid in one thousand will want to
become a hacker.  And those who do, are better off learning how to
download and install a few packages before they get into harder
programming business :-)

-- 
 \___/
 |___|   Bernardo Innocenti - http://www.codewiz.org/
  \___\  One Laptop Per Child - http://www.laptop.org/