LaTeX is a tricky beast for running make on: the need to instruct LaTeX to run several times for essentially different reasons (for example, "get the table of contents stable", "get the labels stable", "add the bibliography", "add the index") is actually rather difficult to express in the 'ordinary' sort of dependency graph that one constructs for make.
For this reason, the only make-like package on CTAN
(for a long time) was latexmk, which is a Perl
script that analyses your LaTeX source for its dependencies, runs
BibTeX or makeindex as and when it notices that those
programs' input (parts of the .aux file, or the .idx file,
respectively) has changed, and so on. Latexmk is a fine
solution (and was used in generating printable versions of these
FAQs for a long time); it has recently been upgraded and has
many bells and whistles that allow it to operate as if it were a poor
man's WYSIWYG system.
The texinfo system comes with a utility called texi2dvi, which is capable of "converting" either LaTeX or texinfo files into DVI (or into PDF, using PDFTeX).
A later contribution is the bundle latexmake, which offers a set of make rules that invoke texi2dvi as necessary.
The curious may examine the rules employed to run the present FAQ through LaTeX: we don't present them as a complete solution, but some of the tricks employed are surely re-usable.