If you specify a fully qualified path to the Output File on the Output Image page of the packager notebook, then VA Smalltalk packager expects the directory that you have specified to exist. If it does not exist, the output image operation will fail and a dialog will inform you that the directory does not exist. To solve the problem either change the Output File specification or create the directory. Then press the Output Again button on the Output Image packager notebook page to attempt the output operation again.

If you find that the size of your saved development image is much larger than when you started, and you have used it primarily for packaging, you might have saved your image with the Packager Control Panel open. As a result of doing this, you will also be saving the in memory packaging instruction objects. Each in memory packaging instruction and related objects can occupy up to two megabytes of memory and disk space in the image. To alleviate the problem either discard the instructions in memory or close the Packager Control Panel.

The most common cause of this is a class which is referenced in an application, but the definition of the class is not in the prerequisites of the application in which the reference is made. As a result, a class name appears in two separate name spaces (applications), and the packager is attempting to dump two different classes which have the same name.

Consider the case where an Application is packaged into an IC and then a different edition of the Application is loaded from VA Smalltalk library into the development image, so that methods that were present in the snapshot are no longer in the image. If you then use the development image to attempt to package ICs that are dependents of the IC last packaged, a walkback during packaging of the dependent IC can occur in the attempt to reference any compiled methods that are no longer in the image. To remedy the problem, ensure that the version of the Application in the image is the same as the one used to create the prerequisite IC.

During reduction, the packager interrogates the snapshot files associated with the prerequisite ICs you selected. It expects to find these snapshot files under the root of the filesystem directory tree specified by the "ini" file property "packagingRootDirectory". If you want to customize the "packagingRootDirectory" property, then you must ensure that you copy the required snapshot files to this alternate location.