I have here a git checkout of X.Org Xserver source and build it out of tree. I open a project in the source directory but I can't build the project nor does it parse any code.

Source is in: ~/dev/xwayland/xserver/src/xserver/
Build directory is in: ~/dev/xwayland/xserver/build/xserver/

Can I point to the Makefile out of tree somehow? Or is there something else to do to make at least the parser work?

For the project analyzer, you can set the include directories and relevant #defines by hand in the project settings, then it should work. For supported build systems (mostly qmake and cmake) those settings are read automatically from the build system, but for automake that doesn't work.

Thanks for answering.

IMO that's a bit sad state of affair. I'm now using Qt Creator, which has builtin Automake support. And that's when I was just ready to ditch it in favor for KDevelop...

Maybe implementing such a support again could be a GSoC project?

The same holds for Meson support, which is gaining some traction currently... I could use it at least for libinput already now.

Having more features would always be nice
But the truth is, we have fairly limited resources to work on KDevelop, and we'd rather it be a tool which is very good for a few workflows, than mediocre for all of them. Automake support is just not in scope for the people currently working on it, since nobody of us ever uses it. If somebody would step up and write a project management plugin for that, it would certainly be a welcome addition though.