Remove Makefile.depend from repository

[David Dickinson]

As the Makefile.depend tends to vary for each person the svn commits tended to contain a lot of changes to this file not related to the main point of the commit. As the file can be generated automatically I propose we remove Makefile.depend from the repository and add it to .gitignore.

[David Dickinson]

See #5 for related

[Stephen Biggs-Fox]

Agreed. Source control is for source files only. Generated automatically = not source. I suggest we do git rm Makefile.depend in the .gitignore branch and add Makefile.depend to the .gitignore file.

[David Dickinson]

Trying to add a dependency like $(DEPEND) : depend (where the $(DEPEND) is Makefile.depend and depend is the target used to build this file) currently seems to lead to infinite recursion. I'll experiment a bit more to see if this can be avoided.

[Bill Dorland]

Just stating the obvious for a moment: these automatically generated files can be removed from the source as long as the tools that built them are retained. I'm thinking here about some of the ruby-related issues. We should be vigilant about pruning sources carefully. That is, if we were to get rid of sources that ruby makes and then get rid of ruby, we might actually end up undoing or redoing maintenance work.

With that statement from "Captain Obvious" stated, I'm in favor of removing automatically generated files from the repo.

[David Dickinson]

The issue with the ruby generated files is that ruby is not as generally available by default as our other dependencies so requiring ruby might lead to problems for people getting the code to work on various machines.

There shouldn't be a problem with removing Makefile.depend as perl is more widely available and users really have to be able to generate this if they want to compile the code with any flags set differently to the "default"

[David Dickinson]

No longer tracking Makefile.depend in next.