debian/rules file is not recognized

[Daniel230196]

Describe the bug
Rules file is not recognized!

To Reproduce
Steps to reproduce the behavior:

1. Go to IDE and create debian/rules file
2. File will not be recognized as debian file - It appears to be just a plaintext file

[nthykier]

Hi @Daniel230196

Thanks for the report.

That is correct. My recommendation is that you install the Makefile plugin from Jetbrains and associate the debian/rules file manually as a Makefile for syntax highlighting for now. It is the simplest solution for now.

I considered to built something on top of that. Unfortunately, it is not trivial to do, because debian/rules may be a Makefile but it is rather atypical. There are a lot of feature interactions between "standard make" and debian/rules conventions, which makes re-using the Makefile plugin an uphill struggle, which the plugin is not built for (related: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/CPP-26124). To solve that, I would have to fork the plugin, which I do not have the capacity to maintain. There was an argument that I could have the plugin auto-enable the Makefile plugin for debian/rules with no other features on top. That is true, but I held out on it because the plugin had some bugs (such as https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/CPP-25625 + https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/CPP-26064, which are both still unfixed) where I would risk being the middle-person for bug reports.

I have been working on an alternative approach, where I develop a language server (debputy) to provide must of these features instead, which may be of interest to you. The debputy language server provides some debian/rules related Debian features (like knowing the name of debhelper hook targets), though you would probably still need the Makefile plugin for things like syntax highlighting (debputy does not have a full Makefile parser either). One of my reasons for changing to this approach is that language servers work with multiple editors, so I get a lot more coverage for the work I put into it.

The downside of this alternative is you would currently have to install debputy (which should be trivial on Debian-based system, but might require an unknown amount of duct tape everywhere else at the moment) and then manually hook it up in the language server into IDEA (which I have never tried, so no idea what you are going for there). At some point, I hope we get to a point where one can trivially get debputy installed on every system transparently via IDEA and the relevant configuration is automatically set up for you (either from Jetbrains or by repurposing this plugin). However, that is not around the corner at the moment.

But as said, even with debputy installed and set up, you would likely still need the Makefile plugin for syntax highlighting of the Makefile. So that would be my starting recommendation.

Hope that was helpful despite not being a fix.