How to tell make to not try to remake source files?

[Antonio Diaz Diaz]

Hello,

In order to increase the efficiency of the build, I added empty recipes to 
my makefiles to prevent 'make' from trying to remake source files:

$(VPATH)/configure $(VPATH)/Makefile.in $(VPATH)/doc/$(pkgname).texi : ;
%.h %.cc : ;

It works. The output of 'make -d' is reduced to less than 1/4 of its 
original size.

The problem is that the second rule above breaks detection of invalid targets:

Expected:
$ make -n foobar
make: *** No rule to make target `foobar'.  Stop.

Obtained:
$ make -n foobar
g++  -Wall -W -O2 -c -o foobar.o foobar.cc
cc   foobar.o   -o foobar
rm foobar.o foobar.cc

Is there a way to tell make with an implicit rule to not try to remake 
source files? For example files with extensions .h and .cc.

An explicit rule listing all the source files as targets and with an empty 
recipe works. But a simple implicit rule would be much better if it could be 
made to work without side effects.

Thanks,
Antonio.