Pattern rules with % matching empty string?

[Glen Huang]

Hi,

I’m trying to do something like this:

remote-bin-host%: bin
        scp $< host$*:$<
        touch $@

to update files in remote hosts.

It works for remote-bin-host1, remote-bin-host2, etc, but not remote-bin-host. 
It seems % won’t match empty string.

I tried mixing static and pattern rule like this to make it work:

remote-bin-host remote-bin-host%: bin
        scp $< host$*:$<
        touch $@

And make complains such mixture is deprecated.

Is there a clean way to write it without splitting the rule and duplicating 
most of the receipt?

Thanks in advance, and hope everyone is staying strong in this crisis.

BTW, is updating remote files like this a bad idea? My use case is that bin is 
a web service, and once built, should be run on a remote dev machine to be 
tested.