This directory is a trimmed vendor drop of scripts/kconfig/ from the Linux kernel (torvalds/linux, master at the time of vendoring). It provides the Kconfig language engine and three front ends:

conf — headless config (config/oldconfig/defconfig/etc.)
mconf — the ncurses menuconfig TUI (uses lxdialog/)
qconf — the Qt xconfig GUI

License — read this before touching anything in this directory

Every file here carries its own upstream SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0 tag. The full license text is in LICENSE in this directory.

This is host-side build tooling only. conf/mconf/qconf run on the machine building StarForth, read Kconfig/.config, and emit a generated Make-syntax config fragment (build/$(ARCH)/include/config/auto.conf). None of this code is compiled into, statically or dynamically linked into, or otherwise shipped as part of the starforth binary or the starkernel_loader.efi / kernel image — the same relationship StarForth already has with gcc, bison, flex, and make themselves. StarForth's own source is licensed under the Starship License 1.0 (see the repository root LICENSE); that license does not apply to this directory, and this directory's license does not apply to the rest of the repository.

See sbom.spdx / sbom.spdx.json for the formal SBOM entry.

What was trimmed from upstream

Kept: the core engine (parser.y, lexer.l, preprocess.c/h, symbol.c, expr.c/h, menu.c, confdata.c, lkc.h, lkc_proto.h, internal.h, util.c), conf.c, mconf.c + lxdialog/ + mconf-cfg.sh, qconf.cc + qconf.h + qconf-cfg.sh.

Dropped: gconf.c/gconf.ui (GTK gconfig — not needed), nconf.c and friends (nconfig — not needed), kconfig's own tests/ directory, and the upstream Makefile (kept alongside as Makefile.upstream-reference for comparison only — it isn't self-contained outside a full kernel source tree, since it depends on scripts/Kbuild.include and scripts/Makefile.host that aren't vendored here; this directory's real Makefile is a small bespoke one written for StarForth specifically).

Updating this vendor drop

git clone --depth 1 --filter=blob:none --sparse https://github.com/torvalds/linux.git
cd linux
git sparse-checkout set scripts/kconfig

then re-copy the files listed above.