Pidgin replace my symlinks

Question

If I move the settins.xml (or any other file) from the .purple folder into another place and create a symlink to this file instead, it gets replaced by regular files after a restart of pidgin. I want to put some configuration files into a git repository and put symlinks to it. That worked on all other programs but pidgin seems to delete the symlinks.

cd .purple
mv settins.xml ../
ln -s ../settings.xml

ls -l settings.xml
settings.xml -> ../settings.xml

restart pidgin

ls -l settings.xml
settings.xml

Why is that happening and what can I do to prevent this behaviour?

Answer 1

Pidgin seems to save everytime settings to settings.xml and does it in the easiest and safe way: It writes/copies everything into a new temporary file and then rename it to settings.xml.

To stop this behaviour, you would need to modify libpurple (bundled with pidgin). The relevant code is probably in libpurple/util.c.