With no feedback at all other than a blinking cursor during a relabel, users have no idea that anything is actually making progress. On a system with a lot of files, this can take upwards of 15-20 minutes in my experience. It'd be nice to have some form of status as it goes and does its thing, similar to how fsck have that nice.. \ [======= ] indicator bar. If figuring out how far along we are is too complicated, even the \|/- twiddler would be better than what we have now. There's a psychological effect at play here too. Ted T'so mentioned once that when they added this visual feedback to ext2.fsck, they got reports from users how great it was that it now went faster than it used to, even though there had been no other changes than the addition of the progress bar :-)
Changed the tool to print a "* every 1000 files and a new line every 80000 files. Don't really know of anything better to do. Dan