As Krzysztof puts it in its commit log in the Linux kernel:
The ncurses library allows for extended colors. The support for extended
colors support depends on wide-character support. ncurses headers
enable extended colors (NCURSES_EXT_COLORS) only when wide-character
support is enabled (NCURSES_WIDECHAR).
The "make menuconfig" uses wide-character ncursesw library, which can be
compiled with wide-character support, but does not define NCURSES_WIDECHAR
and it's using headers without wide-character (and extended colors) support.
This fixes problems with colors on systems with enabled extended colors
(like PLD Linux). Without this patch "make menuconfig" is hard to use.
In kconfig-frontends, we fix this by adding the appropriate CPPFLAGS to the
mconf-specific ncurses CPPFLAGS.
Reported-by: Krzysztof Mazur <krzysiek@podlesie.net>
Signed-off-by: "Yann E. MORIN" <yann.morin.1998@free.fr>
[test "$need_curses" = "yes"],
[AC_MSG_ERROR([could not find curses headers (frontends: mconf/nconf)])],
[has_curses=no])])
+ AS_CASE(
+ [$CURSES_LOC],
+ [ncursesw/*],[ncurses_mconf_CPPFLAGS="$ncurses_mconf_CPPFLAGS -DNCURSES_WIDECHAR=1"])
AC_SEARCH_LIBS(
[initscr],
[ncursesw ncurses curses],