6.18 Tethered Installations

A tethered installation of Racket is a layer (see Layered Installations) that includes a wrapper executable for every executable across the installation’s layers. Each wrapper executable points back to the new layer’s "config.rktd" (see Installation Configuration and Search Paths) without the use of a PLTCONFIGDIR environment variable or --config flag. In other words, a tethered installation provides executables such as racket, raco, and drracket that are tied to the layer. Tethering thus helps to create a layer of installation that behaves in a more self-contained way, but with minimal duplication of the underlying layers.

Tethering works at either a user or installation layer:

In either case, initialization creates tethered executables in the directories tethered-bin-dir and tethered-gui-bin-dir, writing ".desktop" files (for Unix) in tethered-apps-dir (if specified). Thereafter, tethered executables like tethered-bin-dir/racket and tethered-bin-dir/raco can be used to work with the tethered layer.