It seems to me a really bad idea for your program to rely on the install to create user settings. What if there is more than one user? In principle, user settings should created by the program when it is run by a user, not by the installer... Either embed the default config in your program or put it in /usr/share/something and copy it to ~/.something when the program is first run...

How does your program react if the user deletes his .something? It should have reasonable behavior in that case anyways (which also means you don't have to create that file during the installation).

If you want to set up some system-wide defaults, you should put that into /etc/something (and then ownership by "root" is required anyways)

Martin