Looking at the checkroot and checkfs scripts, it seems that the fsck progress bar is only turned on (with -C) when /forcefsck is present. It would be useful to have this option turned on for normal fsck runs as well, since occasionally (e.g. at maximum mount count, or if the filesystem is not marked clean) a thorough fsck will be run, which takes a long time - a progress bar would be preferable in this situation. This involves adding the -C option to fsck on line 26 of /etc/init.d/checkroot, and line 60 of /etc/init.d/checkfs. AFAIK, other distros use this; '-C' only causes a progress bar to appear when one is necessary (i.e. only if a thorough check is being run - not if the filesystem is already marked as clean). (Please, no jokes about thorough fscking...)
Ok, havent really looked at those parts of the scripts for some time, and having ext3 ... ;) Should be fixed on CVS, will make its way into next revision.
In baselayout-1.8.6*.
*** Bug 17395 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
