Note we have:
https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Building_Blender/Dependencies
Which links here:
https://developer.blender.org/diffusion/B/browse/master/build_files/build_environment/CMakeLists.txt

But there's no way to discover this when you just run "make deps".

There are a bunch of build time deps that 'make deps' has, like tclsh , nasm,yasm etc, if they are missing when the build starts, it's very hard for the average user to get 'unstuck' after it breaks and dies, and they install the missing deps since you have to remove the build folder for sqllite for instance for it to look for tclsh again.

Also since we do multi threaded builds, the actual error is generally long scrolled out of the screen when cmake decides to call it quits confusing even more users.

It's probably best if we implement a pre-flight check in cmake that checks for the required dependencies and errors out preemptively

Indeed in the CMake files it says: "# Install compiler cmake autoconf automake libtool yasm nasm tcl"
So technically yes the issue here is not documentation per-se.

Maybe a simple solution would be to suggest "users" to look at the CMakeLists.txt file for instructions if CMake exists with error.