I remember back in the olden days, when building the Linux kernel we ran make config and went through all the questions, answering yes/no on each one depending on how you wanted to have your kernel configured. Then we ran make to build it.
At some point, when the number of options had grown to make this a bit of a hassle, make menuconfig and make xconfig were introduced, making the process a bit faster.
I haven't built a kernel in a long time (decades?) and I wonder if make config still exists, and if so, how many questions do you have to answer if you were to use it?
@loke The best thing about make config, is that there are features you may or may not want further down the line. For a lot of those, you were given not just a y/n question, but also could opt to make a kernel module.
Then if you wanted to use it, you just used insmod, and could delmod it when you were done. Handy for stuff you don't always have plugged in, on the far more limited memory specs we all had way back then.
@loke I recall doing make config in the old days when I needed to build and include a graphics driver in a linux kernel: I think it was in the days before kernel loadable modules.
Haven't touched the linux config system in many years, but I now find myself using menuconfig again, but not in the context of the linux kernel. Espressif's ESP-IDF system uses menuconfig to build applications for the ESP32 MCUs.
@loke I last built custom kernels when the grsecurity patches were still available to everyone, so quite some time ago now.
make menuconfig was manageable, I think you could load a previous config and then revisit the new options? make oldconfig was also a thing to that end?
@lokemake xconfig looked still okay-ish to me. Last time I tried to build a kernel on my Debian machine, I simply failed (ie. had build errors). Was probably like 3-4 years ago, when I ran into hardware/driver issues with my new machine. I found a workaround so that I could keep going with the Debian provided kernel.
@loke Oh what a flash back ... I remeber that I always added a "; cat .../kernel-image > /dev/dsp" or some such .. so that I would wake up when the compile was done.
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