geesh some bugs are so short and trivial they may have been reported
once or twice in the past...


*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 61019 ***

Perhaps the reporter should explain what he understands by "locking a
layer".

locking a layer:
to have some gui widget so that a layer is made unsensible to movement
and editing. usually refered to as a "lock" symbol in photoshop that
prevents changes to the layer

So this confirms that it was indeed a duplicate of the two bugs
reported previously (two years ago for bug #61019).

two years wow.
so there is still no such feature. why is it resolved then? burried
the dust under the carpet?

It was resolved and marked as a DUPLICATE. This was done since we
don't need several bug reports pointing out the exact same bug/feature
request. If you take a look at bug #61019 you will see that it is
still marked as NEW and it even lists this bug (bug #119737) as a
duplicate.

You are encouraged to look through existing bug reports before
reporting a bug to avoid these "double posts".

Hope this clarifies why this bug was marked RESOLVED DUPLICATE.

As Brix said, duplicate bug reports are not very useful so we have to
redirect all duplicates to the original bug report.

If you want to keep track of the status of bug #61019 and see when it
is fixed or when someone starts working on it and submits a patch,
feel free to add your e-mail address in the Cc: field for that bug.
You will then get the Bugzilla notifications for bug #61019 as you
got them for this one.

Regarding your remark "two years now - so there is still no such
feature", the main reason is that there are not enough people
contributing code and patches to the GIMP.  So feel free to submit a
patch to bug #61019 and everybody will be grateful for your
contribution.  If you are not a programmer, try to find someone who
can do it for you and everybody will benefit.  Thanks in advance.