>> On Sun, Nov 02, 2003 at 11:22:26PM +0000, David Laight wrote:
>> > It gets rather anoying when a build fails because the old
>> > .depend file references a now deleted file.

[bit of handwaving here]
It might be preferable to add a new .include method to make
that says in effect - any dependency listed in this file which
does not exist and cannot be "made" should be ignored.

Then you could pretty safely use gcc -MD etc to generate dependencies 
as you build and gather them into .depend (or better allow
.include *.d) and completely skip the extra time spent doing depends.

--sjg