Re: Unexpected prompt during package update

[Roberto C. Sánchez <roberto@debian.org>]

On Sat, Nov 30, 2024 at 05:38:40PM -0500, John Boxall wrote:
> 
> Is the option "-y" in the command not enough to prevent the prompt?
> 
As Andy explained, no the "-y" option will not prevent the prompt.

The "-y" as you have used it is passed to apt-get and defaults the
answers to prompts presented by apt-get to "yes". However, the prompt
you are seeing is actually from debconf (Andy said 'dpkg', which is
partially correct).

According to the debconf(7) manpage [0]:

noninteractive
    This is the anti-frontend. It never interacts with you at all, and
    makes the default answers be used for all questions. It might mail
    error messages to root, but that's it; otherwise it is completely
    silent and unobtrusive, a perfect frontend for automatic installs.
    If you are using this front-end, and require non-default answers to
    questions, you will need to preseed the debconf database; see the
    section below on Unattended Package Installation for more details.

So, it looks like what you want is noninteractive, with preseeding. You
should probably read the entire man page, as there are lots of ways to
tweak the behavior of debconf.

Regards,

-Roberto

[0] https://manpages.debian.org/buster/debconf-doc/debconf.7.en.html

-- 
Roberto C. Sánchez