A google search on ".hdepend" returned many links, one was this:
http://www.torque.net/kbuild/archive/0048.html
It states in part:
--<begin quote>--
> . . . If you interrupt a 'make dep' at the
> right point, you wind up with an invalid .hdepend that needs to be
> removed.
Aha, the generic way to fix that is:
dep-files:
scripts/mkdep `find $(HPATH) ...` > .hdepend.new
mv .hdepend.new .hdepend
--<end quote>--
Looks benign enough to try. I will give it a go this evening, inspecting
the .hdepend.new file before I mv it. Does it make sense to you?
Alan