Comment 16 for bug 1522524

Just to provide some context here ...

The 'deactivate' command was designed as a means of preventing consumption of an image someone had reported as malicious while an operator investigated the image. If the user deletes the image, this accomplishes that goal.

Someone remarked somewhere that this is like flushing the drugs down the toilet when the police knock on the door, and there's something to that point of view, but in this case an administrator could download a copy of the image for analysis either before or quickly after deactivation, if it's important to preserve the image bits.

Part of the reason for allowing image operations such as modifying metadata or sharing while an image is 'deactivated' is that we didn't want to make image deactivation equivalent to an accusation that the image owner was intentionally doing something malicious; we just wanted a way to put the image in suspended animation while an accusation was being looked into.

So I don't see this as a bug as much as something for an administrator to be aware of. As Stuart pointed out somewhere above, the spec never said that the image owner would not be allowed to delete the image. In fact, I'd argue that it's the right of the owner of an image to be able to delete it.