I noticed when I was trying to monkey-patch LDAPSettings that I could not do so because that class is in the backend module which imports model classes. The patch needs to be applied before Django is initialized, and models can only be imported after Django has been initialized.

If this was the only reason for moving the class to a separate module, then I'm not sure it would be worth doing, but it also just feels like it belongs in a different module. I think it does not use any of the imports, for instance.

Possibly just move it to the config module?