how to enforce ordering on a set of targets?

[Robert P. J. Day]

  what's the proper way to enforce an ordering on a set of targets i
have in the following context?  to make a long story short (but
hopefully not so short that i leave out crucial info), i have the
following in a makefile:

  .PHONY: populate populate_base
  populate: populate_base ${SUBDIRS}

where, when i call this makefile with the target "populate", it's
critical that the "populate_base" target there is processed first,
*after* which all of the subdirectory targets can be done in parallel.

  what's the standard way to handle that?  thanks.

rday