Can't mark a patch as obsolete

There is a mechanism by which an attachment may be marked as "not a patch" within the edit attachment interface. There may be an ACL associated with this mechanism, but it is a possible workaround until this bug is addressed.

I don't think we will fix this anytime soon because of the current patch report work we are doing (work to better display and discover patches across Launchpad). That work relies on the patch flag as a marker for reporting which bugs have patches, and the work flow seems pretty ingrained in people we discussed this with to toggle the patch flag off as a sign that the bug attachment doesn't apply, doesn't work as a patch, etc.

That being said, I think it's a fine idea to add an "obsolete" flag on an attachment, but it will create a lot more work for the current patch report work. And I would rather make improvements where we can and worry about adding this field in later if others continue to want this feature.

In case it helps, here is a story:

I want to search for all the bzr bugs with patches attached so that we
can review and either merge them, or turn them into ongoing branches,
or discard them. After doing that, I want to somehow obsolete those
patches so that this process can be repeated later.

It's possible to work around this with tags so it's not urgent.

--
Martin <http://launchpad.net/~mbp/>

another use case:

I look at https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/lucid/+patches as a queue of patches to review for lucid SRU. Almost all of the older tickets in the list have patches attached that are either obsolete or most often rejected for further work. A "patch is obsolete or rejected" would be very useful, indeed.