You must have Ncurses installed in order to use 'make menuconfig'

[Colin Watson]

However, I *do* have libncurses5 installed, as well as every other
packages which matched a search for ncurses on my dselect. My
sources for apt are set as

libncurses5-dev

this makes me wonder why make menuconfig doesn't tell you to install
this particular package! it's completely non-intuitive ...

'make menuconfig' is part of the Linux kernel. libncurses5-dev is
distribution-specific. The Linux kernel isn't generally in a position to
give you advice on things that differ between distributions.

Debian kernel-source packages suggest libncurses-dev (which
libncurses5-dev provides).

Cheers,

[Kevin McKinley]

On Thu, 26 Jun 2003 09:27:54 -0400

this makes me wonder why make menuconfig doesn't tell you to install
this particular package! it's completely non-intuitive ...

Probably because menuconfig works for every Linux distribution, and there's
no way to know whether the required functions will be in libnurses5 or
libncurses5-dev, or libncurses5-devel, or some other package.

Kevin

[Brian Nelson]

However, I *do* have libncurses5 installed, as well as every other
packages which matched a search for ncurses on my dselect. My
sources for apt are set as

libncurses5-dev

this makes me wonder why make menuconfig doesn't tell you to install
this particular package! it's completely non-intuitive ...

Perhaps because the Debian kernel maintainer is leery of modifying the
upstream kernel's Makefile? You could file a wishlist bug against the
'kernel' package (I think that's the right one).

[Vineet Kumar]

However, I *do* have libncurses5 installed, as well as every other
packages which matched a search for ncurses on my dselect. My
sources for apt are set as

libncurses5-dev

this makes me wonder why make menuconfig doesn't tell you to install
this particular package! it's completely non-intuitive ...

Because menuconfig isn't under the control of Debian. it's under the
control of the kernel people.

Right, "install libncurses5-dev" wouldn't make any sense to a RedHat
user. Within Debian, the kernel-package and kernel-source packages do
Suggests: libncurses-dev, though, which I think is a pretty good clue.

good times,
Vineet