This happens on FreeBSD (minotaur) and Solaris, probably because you don't have GNU make there. Here is what it looks like on FreeBSD:
> make "./build/rules.mk", line 255: Could not find /.deps make: fatal errors encountered -- cannot continue > This is caused by two problems: * $(builddir) is empty, so make looks for /.deps instead of ./build/.deps, but this can be corrected by replacing $(builddir) with $(top_builddir), or correcting $(builddir) definition. * there is no .deps file. Top level Makefile has a target for .deps file (creating empty file with touch), but failure is triggered when parsing file -- way before targets are considered at all. Linux also doesn't create build/.deps file, but this isn't fatal (make only displays warning). I'll try to dig into this more later today, but if somebody here has more experience with BSD make, then please feel free to beat me on this. regards, Jacek Prucia
