Created attachment 72843 [details] screenshot of xconfig, showing the broken characters The Linux Kernel Configuration system (lkc) expects 8 bit characters only (declared in scripts/kconfig/zconf.l: %option 8bit). However, the following config entry from drivers/mtd/nand/Kconfig contains two times the character 'É': config MTD_NAND_CAFE tristate "NAND support for OLPC CAFÉ chip" depends on PCI select REED_SOLOMON select REED_SOLOMON_DEC16 help Use NAND flash attached to the CAFÉ chip designed for the OLPC laptop. As it only occurs in a prompt and in a help text, it causes only minor glitches like broken characters in xconfig (see attachment).
Created attachment 89331 [details] menu is broken in make nconfig This screenshot shows what happens to make nconfig when a utf-8 character in a symbol prompt is encountered: the prompt containing the character and all prompts below are not shown and can not be selected.
Created attachment 89341 [details] what the above screenshot looks like without the utf-8 character
all confirmed.
This bug isn't explicitly reported for 'make menuconfig', but I thought I'd post here, since until today, I thought menuconfig was broken w.r.t. UTF-8 too... but if you have the ncursesw ('w' for "wide") development package installed, mconf.o will be linked against it, and 'make menuconfig' will actually display CAFÉ correctly! Haven't checked into fixing nconfig or xconfig. I'll also note for posterity that this was discussed in linux-mtd, and the final verdict can be found here: http://lists.infradead.org/pipermail/linux-mtd/2012-December/045180.html
I just played with nconfig a bit. It looks like it should use the linker flag '-lmenuw' instead of '-lmenu'. With the following hack, 'make nconfig' also works properly. Perhaps I'll work this into a proper patch that will fall back to -lmenu if the wide version is not available. diff --git a/scripts/kconfig/Makefile b/scripts/kconfig/Makefile index 844bc9da08da..193fc8830d05 100644 --- a/scripts/kconfig/Makefile +++ b/scripts/kconfig/Makefile @@ -220,8 +220,8 @@ HOSTCFLAGS_gconf.o = `pkg-config --cflags gtk+-2.0 gmodule-2.0 libglade-2.0` \ HOSTLOADLIBES_mconf = $(shell $(CONFIG_SHELL) $(check-lxdialog) -ldflags $(HOSTCC)) HOSTLOADLIBES_nconf = $(shell \ - pkg-config --libs menu panel ncurses 2>/dev/null \ - || echo "-lmenu -lpanel -lncurses" ) + pkg-config --libs menuw panel ncursesw 2>/dev/null \ + || echo "-lmenuw -lpanel -lncursesw" ) $(obj)/qconf.o: $(obj)/.tmp_qtcheck ifeq ($(qconf-target),1)
Created attachment 137751 [details] hack fix, to make nconfig use the wide ncurses library
Please send the patch to linux-kbuild@vger.kernel.org and Cc: the kconfig maintainer "Yann E. MORIN" <yann.morin.1998@free.fr>. Thanks for your help.
Sure thing. I'll fix it up for falling back to the non-wide version, just in case.
Posted patch for nconfig: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kbuild.devel/11433
My nconfig patch made it to linux-next. So xconfig is the only broken one now.
The nconfig patch was merged 2014-JUN-04 as commit ID 7285996aa0006d671bb01f0d35991d254b2b2b01.
I just ran `make xconfig` (using Qt5, FWIW) on ~v5.7-rc1, and this was no longer a problem there either.