Enforcing stylesheet load order?

It hasn’t really been an issue so far, but I’m still curious how one would handle loading stylesheets in a specific order, without using packages.

I figured the hacky way to do it would be:

client/styles/a_header.less
client/styles/b_footer.less

…since files are loaded alphabetically. But what about this approach:

client/styles/very-first-file.import.less
client/styles/second-file.import.less
client/styles/main.less

And then in main.less:

@import "very-first-file.import.less";
@import "second-file.import.less";

[...]