Question: I got this error while (re)building, using cygwin make.exe version :3.81.

```
Error : *** target pattern contains no `%'.

```

Answer: 
I was getting this error because I didn't have a Tab (\t) character at the beginning of my commands. I had expandtab in my vim set so it was replacing a tab character with 4 spaces. When I turned that off and changed spaces to a tab it was fixed
I had this problem on Linux when the build directory contained a ":" caused by doing a mercurial checkout which created a directory named "server:port".