Advantages Over Earlier Versions
Despite being a simple design, make menuconfig offers considerable advantages to the question-and-answer-based configuration tool, the most notable being a basic search system and the ability to load and save files with filenames different from “.config”. make menuconfig gives the user an ability to navigate forwards or backwards directly between features, rather than using make config by pressing the enter (⏎) key up to 80 times to find a specific feature.
If the user is satisfied with a previous .config file, using make oldconfig uses this previous file to answer all questions that it can, only interactively presenting the new features. This is intended for a version upgrade, but may be appropriate at other times.
make menuconfig is a light load on system resources unlike make xconfig (uses Qt as of version 2.6.31.1, formerly Tk) or make gconfig, which utilizes GTK+. It's possible to ignore most of the features with make menuconfig, and doing so makes it more likely that one will configure an incomplete or oversized kernel. It's recommended to start with the .config file included with the Linux distribution, which makes it easier to configure a custom kernel.
Better than editing the .config by hand, make menuconfig easily shows the descriptions of each feature (?), and adds some (primitive in version 2.6.31.1) dependency checking. With make oldconfig, dependency checking can be done in one step, but requires the user to locate the features that were changed, by hand, to be sure that the needed ones are still enabled.
Practically, using both make menuconfig and make oldconfig, diff, (also cvs and a decent text editor) provides the most flexibility and most dependability. Configuring Linux is a significant labor, so users are strongly advised to make backups of it (i.e. cp /usr/src/linux*/.config ~/savemywork.config).
The help information is distributed throughout the kernel source tree in the various files called Kconfig.
Read more about this topic: Menuconfig
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