I was going to bisect but if it doesn't fail for me in the first place... :(
Thanks. Indeed, reconfiguring etc. got rid of those errors. Now a bunch (12) of the Python tests are failing for me, presumably because of previous Python changes not playing nicely with my older Python version (2.7.5 on CentOS 7). Sigh. Not looking forward to figuring that out. Anyway, that's surely independent of empty dependency files, so I pushed Jan's change. Thanks! --karl