checkinstall freezes at "Copying files to the temporary directory..." when building vim8

Question

I'm having a very strange problem with checkinstall when trying to build vim8. Here's what I did (although probably irrelevant):

• Cloned from vim8 git source
• Ran configure & make --enable-gui=auto. No problem.

Then I ran sudo checkinstall, the installation and man page generation progressed all right, but somehow the program got stuck at the last steps:

Some of the files created by the installation are inside the build
directory: /mnt/C/XXXX

You probably don't want them to be included in the package,
especially if they are inside your home directory.
Do you want me to list them?  [n]: y
Should I exclude them from the package? (Saying yes is a good idea)  [y]: y

Copying files to the temporary directory...

I also tried: checkinstall --install=no, which didn't work either.

Anyone has any ideas? Thanks!

Answer 1

checkinstall's "Copy files to the temporary directory..." process does usually take quite a while for larger programs. Your machine will be different and the program your packaging is different, but when I use checkinstall for GNU Emacs, this part takes around 10 minutes.

If you're waiting anything over and above that, you could use a system monitor (e.g. top) to check what child processes checkinstall has spawned; there's usually processes being started and finishing throughout this "...temporary directory..." part.