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I implemented it this way intentionally. I don't think the default target should mess with the source directory (e.g. by creating symlinks to the build directory somewhere in the source directory). It would be annoying if you're doing a special build of os-autoinst and it would by default change the symlinks within the source directory to that build. It would also be annoying if the source directory isn't writable. Note that the symlinks are also not required if you properly install os-autoinst using the install target.

The documentation also already contains an example with make symlinks.

Well, but you certainly understand that people also assume that the default of make does "all that is needed" to run it by default. So we can consider changing that or we could try to make it work without symlinks, e.g. add additional lookup paths within our files?

"all that is needed" depends from use-case to use-case. One can not expect that we can cover all use-cases in one target.

e.g. add additional lookup paths within our files?

The build directory could be anywhere so that's not that easy.

In a normal C++ project (without Perl) I'd simply launch only built files found within the build directory which of course can contain references to the source directory. Here it is quite annoying that we need to launch scripts from the source directory which need files from the build directory. In that sense it would be natural to "build" isotovideo by simply copying it over to the build directory adjusting search paths. However, I don't think that would be much appreciated as it complicates the overall development workflow.

Maybe we should just move the mentioning of the symlinks target a bit more to the top of the README so also people who only like to read the first few paragraphs are covered.

Maybe we should just move the mentioning of the symlinks target a bit more to the top of the README so also people who only like to read the first few paragraphs are covered.

this would be also helpful imo. it wasnt clear to me if that step was mandatory or not in first sight.

I've noticed that the symlinks target is only not mentioned at the beginning because the first steps show how to use the convenience Makefile. We could actually make symlinks the default target within the convenience Makefile because that is only focusing on this use-case anyways (and shouldn't be used by packages anyways).