[racket-dev] Location of user preferences files

How does DrRacket decide where to put/find user preference files (e.g. language selection, teachpacks, fonts, auto-save, recently opened files, etc.)?  For example, is there a way to persuade DrRacket on a Windows machine to look in a particular place on a particular lettered drive?

Our computing center has locked down the lab computers so they're all restored to a pristine state on reboot.  But they have a "persistent drive" which doesn't get wiped, and I'm negotiating with the computing center to get each student a drive that maps to that student's individual password-protected storage.  Can we get DrRacket to look for a preference file in one of those places?

I have no idea how those preference files are organized -- I assume there's some kind of keyword/value property list -- but one possible implementation is an "include" property that refers to another file location, and acts as though the contents of that file had been inserted here.


Stephen Bloch
sbloch at adelphi.edu