It seems that it proposes a tool that compiles and analyses the LaTeX source file to generate either a ps, pdf or dvi, and to run the needed tools : makeindex, bibtex, etc. and all by itself without having to write a complicated makefile.
From "rubber" man pages :
NAME
rubber - a building system for LaTeX documents
SYNOPSIS
rubber [options] sources ...
rubber-pipe [options]
DESCRIPTION
Rubber is a wrapper for LaTeX and companion programs. Its purpose is,
given a LaTeX source to process, to compile it enough times to resolve
all references, possibly running satellite programs such as BibTeX,
makeindex, Metapost, etc. to produce appropriate data files.
The command rubber builds the specified documents completely. The
source files may be either LaTeX sources (in which case the suffix .tex
may be omitted) or documents in a format Rubber knows how to translate
into LaTeX (this currently means CWEB or Literate Haskell documents).
If one compilation fails, the whole process stops, including the compi‐
lation of the next documents on the command line, and rubber returns a
non-zero exit code.
Some Links :
- Rubber official webpage
- Rubber documentation
- apt://rubber for a direct install.
- Rubber on freshmeat
- ubuntu-fr:LaTeX[French] cf. section "ressources" for some interesting LaTeX links.
