This i quite an odd bug. When using ncurses-5.3-r1, and attempting to use "make menuconfig" over SSH in Windows via PuTTY, everything looks fine and dandy. However, if one uses ncurses-5.3-r2 or greater, then "make menuconfig" looks quite horrible. Now I'm not sure if this is a kernel menuconfig bug, an ncurses bug, or a bug involving the use of PuTTY and Windows. What I do know is that going back to ncurses-5.3-r1 fixes the display problem. Links below show the look of menuconfig using both ncurses-5.3-r1 and ncurses-5.3-r3 (-r4 displays the same as -r3). Looks good: http://dev.gentoo.org/~kumba/ncurses53r1.png Looks bad: http://dev.gentoo.org/~kumba/ncurses53r3.png
i'm inclined to blame putty ... ive seen this on gentoo and slackware boxes, but only ever with putty ... any terminal ive used in linux it looks fine ... also, i remember this happening with older versions of ncurses ...
looks like putty is configured to identify as xterm.
Hmm, so the reccommended fix is to double check putty and find it's "xterm" option, and change it to something else? Also, with putty being the possible culprit, doesn't this also imply something changed in ncurses as well that actually causes this to appear?
The way I see it, the newer ncurses fixes the xterm terminfo to be compatible with xfree's xterm (as opposed to the (unmaintained) x-consortium one), making it incompatible with some clones that (incorrectly) pretend to be xterm compatible. However, there's also a "putty" terminfo entry, so configuring putty to set TERM=putty may help (haven't used putty in ages so I have no idea how to do that; if that's not an option you may have to manually export TERM=putty (or even vt100 or vt220)). (Bartron, heard you'd be back this week so I've added you to CC as you probably know more about this than I do. )
Looks like an optimization with ncurses [ notice the area which isn't drawn == should be a faster speed ] => ncurses is to blame... So, PuTTY probably doesn't understand ncurses telling the console to set line X a certain colour...
bce The offending capability that -r2 adds is `bce' (was missing before and xterm really has this cap...I'll explain later). Could you try if enabling `Use background colour to erase screen' helps? It's in the config dialog under `Terminal', but may only be available while not connected.
Not a Gentoo bug, so I have to close this as INVALID
