Application version numbers

[Hans Meine]

On Thursday 22 January 2009 05:49:41 John Tapsell wrote:
> Is it possible to have an application version just simply be the
> version number of KDE?

I understand that application authors want to have their own versions, but..

> The version numbers tend to be confusing.  For example, kate is
> released with each KDE release.  It follows the KDE releases exactly,
> so shouldn't the kate version be simply the KDE release version?

..that is indeed an annoying situation, I 100% agree.

Now what about the following:  Currently, the about dialog says e.g.:

KMail
Version 1.10.4
Using KDE 4.1.4 (KDE 4.1.4)

Hmm, now that I see the duplication, I get the feeling that we're partway 
there.. what I wanted to propose is sth. like:

KMail
Version 1.10.4 (from KDE 4.1.4)
Using KDE 4.1.4

Additionally, I thought it was a good idea to include the package name (e.g. 
"from kdepim-4.1.4"), but that may be too technical?  (Plus I am running 
Gentoo with the split ebuilds.. ;-) )

Closely related features would be
1) indicating which distro package the application comes from
2) checking for/indicating the most recent stable release
3) checking for the available distro package versions (see 1)

But these are a lot more complex problems of course (except maybe 2, which 
seems quite feasible).  Nevertheless, it would be nice if KDE delivered some 
infrastructure for distributions to implement 1 or even 3.

Have a nice day,
  Hans