Comment 2 for bug 740225

Indeed, this was a design decision. FWIW, that "feature" never really worked properly for upstream projects (i.e. it could have sometimes indicated that something was synced when it wasn't, and vice versa), so while it may have appeared to work, it never really did 100%. Instead of fixing it, we decided it was better to just remove it since it was also causing a lot of confusion (originally, it was conceived only for ubuntu packages, which is where it remains today; the nature of the implementation today doesn't make it easy to bring it back with it's broken behaviour).

The core idea is that Launchpad upstream projects should reflect what upstream really has. If they don't, they are essentially a "fork" of the upstream project (albeit differs only in translations), but Launchpad can't easily model those at the moment. I think it would be a great feature to have, but it would be a new feature.