prompt required in terminal box

Which package exactly was that?

Since F-Prot isn't a package, then the nearest is F-prot-installer.

Right, so how could a non-package cause a prompt in a package upgrade?

Here are the lines from /var/log/dist-upgrade-term.log which I think are relevent:-

dist-upgrade-term.log: ┌─────────────────────┤ Configuring f-prot-installer ├──────────────────────┐
dist-upgrade-term.log: │ I have found the program f-prot in the directory /usr/lib/f-prot/, so I │
dist-upgrade-term.log: │ assume that F-Prot (tm) is already installed on your system. Should I │
dist-upgrade-term.log: │ Alternatively you can upgrade your F-Prot(tm) installation later by │
dist-upgrade-term.log: │ running 'update-f-prot -i' as root. │
dist-upgrade-term.log: │ F-Prot is already installed. Check for newer version? │
dist-upgrade-term.log: ┌─────────────────────┤ Configuring f-prot-installer ├──────────────────────┐
dist-upgrade-term.log: │ F-Prot(tm) for Workstations for you. Download size is approximately 2.8 │
dist-upgrade-term.log: │ You can run 'dpkg --configure f-prot-installer' later to finish │
dist-upgrade-term.log: ┌────┤ Configuring f-prot-installer ├─────┐
dist-upgrade-term.log: │ How should F-Prot(tm) be installed? │
dist-upgrade-term.log:Preparing to replace f-prot-installer 0.5.19~breezy1 (using .../f-prot-installer_0.5.21_i386.deb) ...
dist-upgrade-term.log:Unpacking replacement f-prot-installer ...
dist-upgrade-term.log:Setting up f-prot-installer (0.5.21) ...
dist-upgrade-term.log:Moving /usr/lib/f-prot/MACRO.DEF to /var/lib/f-prot
dist-upgrade-term.log:Symlinking /var/lib/f-prot/MACRO.DEF to /usr/lib/f-prot/MACRO.DEF
dist-upgrade-term.log:Moving /usr/lib/f-prot/SIGN2.DEF to /var/lib/f-prot
dist-upgrade-term.log:Symlinking /var/lib/f-prot/SIGN2.DEF to /usr/lib/f-prot/SIGN2.DEF
dist-upgrade-term.log:Moving /usr/lib/f-prot/SIGN.DEF to /var/lib/f-prot
dist-upgrade-term.log:Symlinking /var/lib/f-prot/SIGN.DEF to /usr/lib/f-prot/SIGN.DEF
dist-upgrade-term.log:installing f-prot

Assigning this as an update-manager bug. In short - Update Manager should provide visible cues whenever the user's input is required during the upgrade of one or more packages. The visible cue can pop up on top of the running applications, or be indicated by a blinking update manager icon (in the tray), or at the very least, the progress bar in update manager should stop moving, and there must be some text in the update manager window that indicates the need for user input.

There is no way to get this information. Furthermore user input in postinst should not be used and is a violation of the Ubuntu packaging principles. So this would always be a bug of the package itself. That is why there is debconf. Dist-upgrader and synaptic will show the terminal after a short timeout automatically.

f-prot-installer already seems to use debconf. But I assume that you don't run a default Ubuntu desktop? Please check if libgnome2-perl is installed on your system. So you can get a graphical representation of debconf questions.

But it seems to be a bug here. That we don't show the terminal if there is only a text viewer for debconf.

Thanks for your bugreport.

Can you please include the file in /var/log/dist-upgrade/*.log to this report? This make debugging the problem easier.

Thanks,
 Michael

[Expired for update-manager (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]