recursive makes and subdirectory dependencies

[Robert P. J. Day]

  i'm interested in how to combine two different techniques for a 
recursive make structure to get the best of both worlds (if that's 
possible).

  until now, i've used the following approach.  in a top-level included 
makefile, i've defined the overall set of targets that pretty much all 
subdirectories should be able to process:

  TARGETS = clean realclean configure compile package ... (and so on)
  .PHONY: ${TARGETS}

and a short macro to handle processing any makefile's subdirectories:

  define MAKE-SUBDIRS
  @for d in ${SUBDIRS} ; do \
      ${MAKE} -C $$d $@ ; \
  done
  endef

now, in any makefile throughout my software tree, if i include the above 
makefile, i can just define:

  SUBDIRS = d1 d2 d3 d4         # the subdirectories for *this* makefile
  
  ${TARGETS}:
          ${MAKE-SUBDIRS}

and i automatically get the canonical targets defined recursively.  so 
far, so good.  (i hope.)

  if i need to override one of those targets -- say, "configure" --, i can
(in the appropriate makefile), do:

  TARGETS := ${TARGETS:configure=}

  ${TARGETS}:
          ${MAKE-SUBDIRS}

  configure:
          ... whatever the redefinition of "configure" is

again, so far, i think this is fairly boilerplate stuff.

  but i'd like to cram in to this structure the stuff in section 4.6 in
the make manual, the section on Phony Targets, where i can rewrite
subdirectory processing to support parallel builds and (at least as
important) the notion of the occasional prerequisite between
subdirectories.  the technique:

  SUBDIRS = d1 d2 d3 d4
  .PHONY : subdirs ${SUBDIRS}

  subdirs : ${SUBDIRS}
  ${SUBDIRS} :
        ${MAKE} -C $@

  d3 : d2               # just as an example of a prerequisite


i've just started to ponder this, but is there a standard way to combine
these approaches?  it's probably painfully obvious to the make gurus here,
but i don't see it yet.

thanks.

rday