A successor for QSettings (throughout the QGIS codebase) seems to be QgsSettings (#72), which enables the (additional) use of a global settings file.
Therefore I added from qgis.core import QgsSettings to config_dialog.py, dbutils.py, discoveryplugin.py & mssql_utils.py and replaced every occurence of QSettings in these files.
A successor for QSettings (throughout the QGIS codebase) seems to be QgsSettings (#72), which enables the (additional) use of a global settings file. Therefore I added
from qgis.core import QgsSettings
to config_dialog.py, dbutils.py, discoveryplugin.py & mssql_utils.py and replaced every occurence of QSettings in these files.