Re: [Evolution] unkown background operation

[Pete Biggs <pete biggs org uk>]

On Sat, 2015-01-31 at 22:54 -0600, Garry Ricketson wrote:
> Hello every one, I am new to this list and also a first time user of
> this "evolution". 

My advice to people who are new to a mailing list is usually to lurk a
while or at least look through and search archives to get an idea of how
things work.  In this case you would notice that virtually every time
someone asks a question, someone else will ask for the Evolution version
number and possibly their environment (type of mail account, distro,
GUI, that sort of thing).

So, what is your Evolution version and what sort of mail account are we
talking about here. (Version info is at Help -> About)

>  It seems to be working fine, but at the bottom of the screen I see a
> red stop sign thing, and it says "unknown background operation", I am
> wondering what that means, how can I find out what the "background
> operation is, ?

You can't - it's unknown. i.e. Evolution hasn't been told what something
is doing when it posts that message.  You could possibly try doing back
traces and the like but it's not trivial and you may not get very far.

>  I find it disturbing that it is doing something in the
> "background" that I do not know what it is doing,..

Applications do lots of things in the background - for instance mail
programs like Evolution retrieve mail in the background, process
indexes, spam checking, filtering,  process virtual folders and so on.
If it didn't do lots of things in the background you would spend most of
the time waiting for tasks to complete unable to use the program.

What I suspect that this error means is that one part of the program has
initiated a background process, but that process hasn't yet told the gui
what it's doing, so it is an "unknown background operation".  I know
that such things did appear in old versions of Evolution - which is why
it's important to know what version you are running.

P.