makefile pattern rules without recipes

Question

I\'m observing an interesting behavior of make and I wonder if there is a reasonable explanation to it besides a bug in gmake.

Let\'s say we have the following in ma

Answer 1

Pattern rules with no recipes at all are documented as meaning something quite different from those providing a recipe, even an empty one. Instead they cancel any pre-existing implicit rule:

You can cancel a built-in implicit rule by defining a pattern rule with the same target and prerequisites, but no recipe.

Thus your "%-wolf" pattern actually serves to cancel any existing implicit rule for %-wolf-animal -> %-wolf. And there wasn't one anyway.