GNU Autotools analogue to Python setuptools "development mode"

Question

Python packages configured with setuptools have a nice feature called "development mode" (named "editable install" by pip), which installs symbolic links from files in the appropriate install directories (/usr/lib/..., etc.) to files in the package directory instead of copying them.

The idea being of course that you can use this while developing the package, as it saves you the time of running the whole installation again every time you make a change.

Is there an analogous feature in or extension for the GNU Autotools (Autoconf, Automake), such that you could run e.g. make develop once before starting development, have it create the appropriate symlinks and be done with it?

Answer 1

There is no built-in feature like this.

Many packages work ok (-ish) without being installed. Whether this works is up to the package author, though.

Another approach like this that can work is to redefine INSTALL to point to a script that uses ln -s rather than cp. This program should also accept a -m argument, and perhaps other arguments accepted by install. You would do this at install time, like make INSTALL=/path/to/my/script install.