RE: Why don't we separate menuconfig from the kernel?

["Martin Fouts" <Martin.Fouts@palmsource.com>]

I don't have a patch yet, but I've just spent a bit of time looking at
how kbuild works, and I believe there is a fairly straightforward way to
keep kbuild in the kernel tree but make it easy to split it out so that
someone could use it as a separate tool.

If this idea, appropriately modified, makes sense, I'll spend a bit of
time to do a patch and set it up.

The basic idea is that kbuild stays in the kernel source tree, but a
simple script is used to grab a copy of it out of the tree.  That copy
is maintained as a separate "build/configuration" package, and the
maintainer (yes, I'm volunteering) would keep the two versions in (near)
sync.

After a quick glance, it looks like one would want to copy

Documentation/kbuild/*
Scripts/kconfig/*
Makefile

To this new copy.  The only real work to get started, it appears, and
the reason why I'd rather have a discussion before I start, would be to
split the toplevel Makefile up a bit, so that the 'pure kbuild' bits
were moved into an include file. It's really that include file, not the
toplevel Makefile that would need to be copied.

I suggest doing this because most of the make-related knowledge about
kbuild itself is in that Makefile, but non-kernel users would not want
the kernel specific targets.

I know of two other packages (busybox and ptxdist) that use kconfig now,
and have been contemplating it for some of my projects, as well, so I'm
interested enough to take the project on.

Marty
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