debconf: unable to initialize frontend: Dialog

[Strator]

For a few months now, every time I run "yum update" on my Almalinux server, the update ends with various debconf errors:

debconf: unable to initialize frontend: Dialog
debconf: (No usable dialog-like program is installed, so the dialog based frontend cannot be used. at /usr/share/perl5/vendor_perl/Debconf/FrontEnd/Dialog.pm line 79.)
debconf: falling back to frontend: Readline
Scanning processes...
Scanning candidates...

Restarting services...
Daemons using outdated libraries
--------------------------------


1. clamav-freshclam.service 5. directadmin.service 9. httpd.service 13. php-fpm80.service 17. spamassassin.service
2. [email protected] 6. dovecot.service 10. lfd.service 14. php-fpm83.service 18. sshd.service
3. console-getty.service 7. exim.service 11. mysqld.service 15. pure-certd.service 19. systemd-logind.service
4. dbus-broker.service 8. [email protected] 12. nginx.service 16. pure-ftpd.service 20. none of the above

(Enter the items or ranges you want to select, separated by spaces.)

Which services should be restarted?

Kinda hoped this would be a glitch that would go away through a following update, but since it didn't, I finally did the forensics today. It appears that debconf was installed on my system with DA 1.702, or more specifically, with the integration of needrestart.

68 | --quiet --assumeyes install needrestart | 2026-06-29 12:24 | Install

Which then proceeded to install the following packages:

perl-Text-WrapI18N-0.06-41.el9.noarch Mon 29 Jun 2026 12:24:28 PM BST
perl-Text-Iconv-1.7-43.el9.x86_64 Mon 29 Jun 2026 12:24:28 PM BST
perl-Text-CharWidth-0.04-44.el9.x86_64 Mon 29 Jun 2026 12:24:28 PM BST
perl-Sort-Naturally-1.03-29.el9.noarch Mon 29 Jun 2026 12:24:28 PM BST
perl-Proc-ProcessTable-0.634-1.el9.x86_64 Mon 29 Jun 2026 12:24:28 PM BST
perl-Module-Find-0.15-2.el9.noarch Mon 29 Jun 2026 12:24:28 PM BST
perl-Locale-gettext-1.07-21.el9.x86_64 Mon 29 Jun 2026 12:24:28 PM BST
perl-List-MoreUtils-XS-0.430-5.el9.x86_64 Mon 29 Jun 2026 12:24:28 PM BST
perl-List-MoreUtils-0.430-4.el9.noarch Mon 29 Jun 2026 12:24:28 PM BST
perl-libintl-perl-1.32-4.el9.x86_64 Mon 29 Jun 2026 12:24:28 PM BST
perl-File-ShareDir-1.118-4.el9.noarch Mon 29 Jun 2026 12:24:28 PM BST
perl-Exporter-Tiny-1.002002-6.el9.noarch Mon 29 Jun 2026 12:24:28 PM BST
perl-Class-Inspector-1.36-7.el9.noarch Mon 29 Jun 2026 12:24:28 PM BST
needrestart-3.8-1.el9.noarch Mon 29 Jun 2026 12:24:28 PM BST
debconf-1.5.91-1.el9.noarch Mon 29 Jun 2026 12:24:28 PM BST

I don't think that debconf, which came from the epel repository, should be on my non-Debian system, and the errors above seem to confirm that. Which bears two question: Why was it installed anyway, and more importantly, how can I get rid of it in a way that it doesn't return with the next update? Thank you.