first-follow | small tool | Apps library

I am getting weird behavior in Makefile. Basically for grammar.aps, it needs to run grammar.generate to create the file first and then grammar.class to compile the generated file. If I run the dependencies individually all works. But if I run grammar.aps it doesn't work.

You are trying to treat your makefile as if it were a script. It isn't. At the most basic level, it is a declarative description of your project that tells make how it can construct one or more targets given specific lists of prerequisites for each. Each prerequisite list is only incidentally ordered. That one prerequisite appears lexically ahead of another has no significance. It is up to make to choose and execute a build plan based on the information in the makefile and the files available.

In particular, make performs its analysis of which intermediate targets to build based on the prerequisites available at the start of the run, in light of the declared build rules. Furthermore, prerequisite build order is constrained only by prerequisites' own prequisites, and it is not necessarily predictable.

However, make does give you pretty informative error messages. For example, this ...