Inside Macintosh: Operating System Utilities /

Chapter 10 - Package Manager

About the Package Manager

The Package Manager lets you load packages into memory. A package is a set of routines and data types that is stored as a resource of type 'PACK'. In early models of the Macintosh computer, all packages were disk-based and brought into memory only when needed; some packages are now in ROM. The System file contains the standard Macintosh packages and the resources they use or own. Table 10-1 lists the standard Macintosh packages.

Table 10-1 The standard Macintosh packages

Package	Description	Resource ID
List Manager	Provides routines that your application can use to create scrollable lists that allow the user to select one or more of a group of items.	0
Disk Initialization Manager	Provides routines that initialize and name new floppy disks. This package is called by the Standard File Package and applications.	2
Standard File Package	Provides routines that your application can use to display dialog boxes that let the user specify the locations of files to be saved or opened.	3
Floating-Point Arithmetic Package	Provides routines that support extended-precision arithmetic according to IEEE Standard 754.	4
Transcendental Functions Package	Provides routines that support trigonometric, logarithmic, exponential, and financial functions, and a random number generator.	5
Text Utilities (formerly referred to as the International Utilities Package)	Provides routines that your application can use to specify strings for various purposes, to format numbers and currency, format date and time, search and replace text, and more.	6
Text Utilities (formerly referred to as the Binary-Decimal Conversion Package)	Provides routines that your application can use to specify strings for various purposes, to format numbers and currency, format date and time, search and replace text, and more.	7
Apple Event Manager	Provides routines that your application can use to respond, send, and record Apple events.	8
PPC Browser	Provides routines that your application can use to display the program linking dialog box, which allows a user to select a port to communicate with.	9
Edition Manager	Provides routines that your application can use to allow users to share and automatically update data and numerous documents and applications.	11
Color Picker	Provides routines that your application can use to display a standard dialog box for choosing a color, and converts color specifications from one color model to another.	12
Data Access Manager	Provides routines that your application can use to gain access to data in another application, and provides templates to be used for data transactions.	13
Help Manager	Provides routines that your application can use to provide Balloon Help online assistance.	14
Picture Utilities	Provides routines that obtain qualitative and quantitative information about pictures and pixel maps.	15

If the Package Manager is not able to load a package, the Package Manager adds the resource ID number of the affected package to 17 to get an error number. The System Error Handler uses this error number to display an error message. Originally this approach worked because there were only 7 packages, and the error number would fall between 17 and 24, which are the error numbers that define the "Can't load package" error. However, now there are more packages and the resulting error messages from packages with resource IDs greater than 7 are misleading.

The error messages that corresponds to packages with resource IDs greater than 7 are as follows:

Resource ID	Package	Error ID	Error
9	Apple Event Manager	25	Out of memory
9	PPC Toolbox	26	Can't launch file
11	Edition Manager	28	Stack overflow
12	Color Picker	29	*
13	Data Access Manager	30	Disk insertion required
14	Help Manager	31	Wrong disk inserted
15	Picture Utilities	32	*

The system errors are described in detail in the chapter "System Error Handler" in this book.

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* There is not a defined system error for this error ID.