Comment 14 for bug 2039873

This was definitely a mistake made when preparing the original LXC 5.0 snapshot for upload in Ubuntu.

LXC_DEVEL=1 should only ever be set when dealing with current snapshots of the upstream codebase.
Shipping an older snapshot with LXC_DEVEL=1 set will cause any tool that consumes liblxc and which needs to do feature detection to incorrectly expect that the liblxc version present on the system has that feature supported, at best causing build failures, at worst causing runtime crashes.

I can certainly see how this mess was created with 5.0.0 as we had to push a pre-release snapshot to the archive and keep the build on autotools due to issues with meson at the time (resolved in 5.0.1).
Using an upstream snapshot rather than a release tarball, caused the inclusion of the problematic LXC_DEVEL=1.

What's quite puzzling is how we ended up with the 5.0.1 upload also having that LXC_DEVEL=1 bit be applied as a patch on top of it... Looking at the changelog, it appears that Serge simply pulled all changes following 5.0.1 from git, which he likely did mistakenly looking at the master branch rather than the stable-5.0 branch which wouldn't have had that particular change.

My opinion is that we really need to:
 - Drop the LXC_DEVEL=1 cherry-pick from noble, ideally merge with Debian to pull in the more current 5.0.3 too.
 - Drop the LXC_DEVEL=1 cherry-pick from both mantic and lunar
 - Add a batch to drop LXC_DEVEL=1 from the git snapshot of 5.0 that's in jammy

Additionally, I'd very strongly recommend that an autopkgtest test is added to validate that no liblxc package ever ship with LXC_DEVEL=1 ever again.