I have a script which does an ncftpget in a cron job. It just started blatting progress bar crap into the output of the cron job. It didn't used to do this -- presumably, ncftpget previously was smart enough to notice when it wasn't running on a tty and suppress the progress bar, but this has been broken. I'm running ncftp-3.1.5-1.
I don't think this is a bug since there is an option to disable the progress bar for ncftpget. $ ncftpget --help NcFTPGet 3.1.3 <snip> -v/-V Do (do not) use progress meters. So, if you add the "-V" option to your cron job, you should not see the progress meter stuff in your output.
A simple update of a package shouldn't break scripts if possible. The check for tty was disabled in 3.1.5-1. I've re-enabled it in 3.1.5-2