make menuconfig or make oldconfig still need to be run before build-kernel.sh, .config not detected

[mgbalant]

The way I'm checking this is by downloading a somewhat recent kernel and its corresponding patch from kernel.org, putting the patch suffixed by .patch to work with the build-kernel.sh script into a one-higher level directory "linux-patches" as required, unpacking the kernel source, and putting the scripts inside the kernel source folder.

I run "bash build-kernel.sh" which blows up needing make menuconfig/make xconfig/make oldconfig first.

Second, I created a .config via make menuconfig and then ran the build-kernel.sh script which still claims a .config doesn't exist even after the make menuconfig step, following by saving to a .config.