[sabayon] Customising Pidgin

[Graham Cole <chckens sucs org>]

Hi,

I help to admin a small network of desktop machines running GNOME.  
I've recently been investigating Sabayon as a way to make the default  
Fedora GNOME desktop better fulfil our users' needs.

One thing which I'd like to do is have the Pidgin (formerly Gaim)  
instant messenger automatically configured to connect to our  
organisation's XMPP server for newly created users. The major issue  
here is the fact that Pidgin needs to have the username stored in its  
accounts file in order to create any kind of usable configuration.

What I'm wondering is if there's a sensible way to do this in the  
context of Sabayon. I don't see any obvious mechanism for  
substituting variables into configuration files. It seems to me that  
it's a reasonable thing to want to do (consider also configuring e.g.  
e-mail accounts).

Would it perhaps be a case of writing a module which deals with  
Pidgin settings specifically? Or am I trying to do something which  
Sabayon plain isn't-designed-for?

Any guidance much appreciated :-)

- Graham Cole, Swansea University Computer Society