Eliminate some no-longer-needed workarounds for palloc's old behavior

of rejecting palloc(0).  Also, tweak like_selectivity() to avoid assuming
the presented pattern is nonempty; although that assumption is valid,
it doesn't really help much, and the new coding is more correct anyway
since it properly handles redundant wildcards.  In combination these
changes should eliminate a Coverity warning noted by Martijn.