Comment 38 for bug 292606

Mike Stroyan's analysis is correct. This is not a bug in nvidia-common, it's a bug in dkms for outputting to stdout.

Standard Ubuntu kernel packages don't load the debconf confmodule, but custom packages built with make-kpkg do, and this is perfectly legitimate. Anything called from a maintainer script that has debconf loaded should not be outputting to stdout. For that matter, Ubuntu Policy has this to say about maintainer script output in general:

 3.9. Maintainer Scripts
 -----------------------

     The package installation scripts should avoid producing output which
     is unnecessary for the user to see and should rely on `dpkg' to stave
     off boredom on the part of a user installing many packages. This
     means, amongst other things, using the `--quiet' option on
     `install-info'.

dkms really needs to be fixed to not output on stdout. If output is needed, it should use stderr - but output really should not be needed at all except in the case of errors.