Question

I have a Gnome applet written in Python. In order to save configuration data/settings, it creates a file ~/.appname.

However, this prevents multiple instances of the applet from being added to the panel because each cannot have its own settings.

How can I store the settings in a way that allows each instance to have its own unique settings?

Update: I specifically want to know how to store settings per instance.

Answer 1

The recommend way for an applet would be to use GConf to store preferences and to use one key per instance so that you can store individual settings. From Panel Applet GConf Utilities:

Applets typically define a set of
preferences using a schemas file and
panel_applet_add_preferences(). Such
preferences apply only to an
individual applet instance. For
example, you may add two clock applets
to the panel and configure them
differently.

In order for the preferences to only
apply to a single applet, each applet
must have a seperate GConf key for
each of these preferences. The methods
described below provide convient
wrappers around the usual GConfClient
functions and operate on these
per-applet keys.