Comment 7 for bug 440370

It's a good point that making everything insensitive would leave you unable to change your mind about closing without cancelling all the current tasks. And even if that was implemented, exactly the same issue occurs with Update Manager: if you begin installing updates, then open the Ubuntu Software Center, the "In Progress" section appears with one nameless item, and (apart from the namelessness problem) that might not be such a bad idea.

Please excuse me if my logic is wobbly here, but I think the next version of Update Manager should be able to represent application updates with the application icons and friendly names, rather than as multiple obscure packages, just like the Center does. And in an ideally-translated world, those application names and summaries will often differ by localization, and therefore possibly even differ between user accounts on the same computer.

So, I think there should be a library function that, given a package name and a repository, calculates its friendly name, summary, icon, etc for your localization. The Ubuntu Software Center should use this function throughout, and so should Update Manager. So aptdaemon itself doesn't need to know what the application name or icon are; it just needs to track packages and repositories, and be able to tell any client what it's doing with those packages. Does that make sense?