'nothing to be done for' error with .PHONY rule - makefile

Question

I have a wildcard rule to grab all of the files in a directory as tests and run them, and a .PHONY rule to make sure I can run all of the tests regardless of whether they've been previously run. When I run make tests/PA5obj.java or make test it returns with `make: Nothing to be done for 'test'.
Sometimes after I add new files to the tests/ dir, I have to run make clean before it will pick them up in make test, so I'm unsure if there's a caching issue or something, but that wouldn't explain why make test is also not working.
Here is the relevant section of the makefile:
PROG = Test
TESTS = $(wildcard tests/*.java)
.SUFFIXES: .java.class
#-------------------------
JCC = javac
JAR = jar
#-------------------------
all: $(PROG).jar
.PHONY:test $(TESTS)
test: $(TESTS)
tests/%.java: $(PROG).jar
#echo "#### testing $# ####"
#java -jar $(PROG).jar $#
#echo "> Passed"
$(PROG).jar: Main.class
$(JAR) cmf $(PROG)MainClass.txt $(PROG).jar $^
Main.class: Main.java
javac $^
The necessary files are:
TestMainClass.txt
Main-Class: Main
and Main.java
import java.util.Scanner;
import java.lang.System;
import java.io.File;
import java.io.FileNotFoundException;
class Main {
public static void main(String args[]) {
if (args.length < 1) {
throw new RuntimeException("Usage: Main <filename> ");
}
String filename = args[args.length-1];
try {
Scanner sc = new Scanner(new File(filename));
System.out.println("Contents of file: " + filename);
while (sc.hasNext()) {
System.out.println(sc.nextLine());
}
}
catch (FileNotFoundException e) {
System.out.println(e);
System.exit(1);
}
}
}
Running make test should simply read all of the files in the test dir (as a minimal example)

Answer 1

Make will execute the rule of a PHONY target, even if a file exists with that name.
But this does not apply to pattern rules, which is why you have this problem.
But it does apply to static pattern rules (at least in the version of GNU Make I'm using). So give this a try:
$(TESTS): tests/%.java: $(PROG).jar
...

Answer 2

You don't have any targets that depend on the test target. Since the test target depends on the jar target, you can change the all target to depend on the test target instead of the jar target.