Zack's Kernel News
Zack's Kernel News
Chronicler Zack Brown reports on the latest news, views, dilemmas, and developments within the Linux kernel community.
Status of "make menuconfig"
Aldo Iljazi suggested that since make nconfig was added to the kernel in 2.6.35, make menuconfig has become redundant and should be removed. Both build targets are used to configure the kernel before compiling, but make nconfig is a fork of make menuconfig that tries to have a sleeker, more modern-looking appearance.
The suggestion met a lot of resistance. Alexander Holler said that nconfig seemed to rely on the Fn keys to control the configuration process, which would cause problems on keyboards that had no Fn keys. He pointed out that not only some physical keyboards, but also software keyboards on "smart" phones, had no Fn keys. This would make it difficult to ssh into a workstation from a phone to compile the kernel with nconfig.
Randy Dunlap eliminated that objection when he pointed out that nconfig could use either the Fn keys or the equivalent number keys, which did exist in software keyboards. But, Randy said he still saw no need to get rid of menuconfig.
[...]
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