[Bug 2039873] Re: liblxc-dev was built with LXC_DEVEL=1 in Ubuntu 22.04 and later releases

[Stéphane Graber]

My two cents here are that we should:
 - Rapidly fix the LXC_DEVEL situation across all supported Ubuntu releases.
 - Separately prepare a new package for noble which performs the Debian merge and introduces the needed transitional packages to get users from the current Ubuntu-specific naming over to the Debian names, those can then go away in noble+1 at which point LXC should be automatically syncable from Debian.

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Title:
  liblxc-dev was built with LXC_DEVEL=1 in Ubuntu 22.04 and later
  releases

Status in lxc package in Ubuntu:
  Confirmed

Bug description:
  [ Impact ]

  LXC 5.0.0 was built with LXC_DEVEL=1 set for Jammy. But for release
  build we should have LXC_DEVEL=0.

  LXC_DEVEL is a variable that appears in the /usr/include/lxc/version.h
  and then can be (and actually it is) used by other projects to detect
  if liblxc-dev is a development build or stable.

  Having LXC_DEVEL=1 makes problems for the users who want to build projects those are depend on liblxc
  from source (for example, LXD, go-lxc: https://github.com/canonical/lxd/pull/12420).

  Q: Why it was not a problem for so long?
  A: Because LXC API was stable for a long time, but recently we have extended liblxc API (https://github.com/lxc/lxc/pull/4260) and dependant package go-lxc was updated too (https://github.com/lxc/go-lxc/pull/166).
  This change was developed properly to be backward compatible with the old versions of liblxc. But, there is a problem. If LXC_DEVEL=1 then the macro check VERSION_AT_LEAST (https://github.com/lxc/go-lxc/blob/ccae595aa49e779f7ecc9250329967aa546acd31/lxc-binding.h#L7) is disabled. That's why we should *not* have LXC_DEVEL=1 for *any* release build of LXC.

  [ Test Plan ]

  Install liblxc-dev package and check /usr/include/lxc/version.h file
  LXC_DEVEL should be 0

  [ Where problems could occur ]

  Theoretically, build of a software which depends on liblxc-dev may start to fail
  if it assumes that LXC_DEVEL is 1.

  [ Other Info ]

  -

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