[ubuntu-dev] Bug#924761: Gdebi gives no indication when it is working, and by dint of that makes the user suspect a hang

[Nicholas Joll]

Package: gdebi
Version: 0.9.5.7xmint8

When I open a large .deb with gdebi, such as a .deb created by building
the Linux kernel, gdebi - because it is doing some sort of checking or
loading? - does nothing, sometimes for some ten seconds. (This happens
even on a quadcore, i7, nvme SSD laptop with 16GM of RAM.) No message is
displayed about what is transpiring. Consequently the user has little
idea what is happening and wonders whether gdebi has hung. A related
problem: on my system at least, the terminal that one can display from
gdebi has a non-flashing cursor; hence one cannot visually distinguish a
hang from an operation in progress. Still, perhaps that latter problem
involves something other than gdebi.

Kernel: 5.0.0
$  ls -l /lib/*/libc.so.6
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 12 Apr 16  2018 /lib/i386-linux-gnu/libc.so.6 ->
libc-2.27.so
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 12 Apr 16  2018 /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6
-> libc-2.27.so

My OS: Linux Mint 19.1 x64 Cinnamon (but this is - in some fundamental
sense, anyway - a Debian package, I take it; hence this bug report).