On Sat, Jan 14, 2006 at 02:41:50PM -0800, John Temples wrote:
> "makedepend" will generate a dependency list and insert it into your
> makefile, and it handles cases like you mention above (without
> modifying timestamps).  This requires you to manually run makedepend
> when you change your dependencies, but it doesn't require you to
> manage the dependencies yourself.
> 
> With some clever scripting, you can have makedepend run when you do a
> "make" and keep all the dependencies updated automatically.

Also if you are writing actual Linux/Unix/Whatever programs, rather than
microprocessor stuff, take a look at autoconf and automake. It's the
standard build setup for opensource programs these days. It
(essentially) takes a list of source files and automatically generates
the makefiles for you as well as determining details like what
C-compiler to use, what features are available on the current system
etc. It's what allows opensource software to be portable accross so many
different architectures and environments, and it handles dependencies
quite nicely.

That said, on all my PIC projects to date I don't even use dependencies.
Everything is compiled into one static image. Microprocessor code is so
small, and modern computers are so fast, it's not even worth the bother
I find for my projects. We're not talking about the millions of lines of
code in the Linux kernel after all!

-- 
pete@petertodd.ca http://www.petertodd.ca
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