gmake calls make in SUBDIRS

Hi,

my apologies if this is just the result of not actively developing for a 
couple of years. I've picked up again maintaining a piece of software 
with a top-level Makefile.am which defines several subdirectories using 
the SUBDIRS variable. My lazy butt used lots of the oh so convenient GNU 
make specific pattern rules back then. This never used to be a problem 
though. Just running gmake on the top-level Makefile would call gmake 
for all subdirectories. This behaviour seems to have changed at some 
point between the days of yore and yesterday. At present, gmake returns 
an error complaining about the unknown pattern rules, i.e. gmake calls 
make in the subdirectories. I can cd into a subdirectory and call gmake. 
Or I run "MAKE=gmake gmake" in the top-level directory. Either way, the 
build goes fine. I ran autogen.sh and autoreconf to avoid that any old 
configuration stuff is outdated, to no avail. Am I missing something 
here?

My system is: FreeBSD wombat 12.2-RELEASE-p7 FreeBSD 12.2-RELEASE-p7 
GENERIC  amd64

thanks
Markus

-- 
Markus Hoenicka
http://www.mhoenicka.de
AQ score 38