GNOME component versioning

[rms39 columbia edu (Russell Steinthal)]

Is there currently a facility for quickly determining the versions of 
various GNOME components in use on a system?  Would such a system be 
useful?

To give you an idea of what I'm thinking about, imagine a tab in the 
"About GNOME" dialog box which summarized the versions of your 
installed GNOME components, such as "panel 1.0.4", "gmc 4.5.30", etc. 
 I know that sort of information is available from the individual 
applications about boxes, but it might be useful (especially for 
automated bug reporting) for that information to be summarized in one 
convenient location.

Of course, implementation could be a problem.  One way to do it might 
be to have the standard install script (perhaps the new build tool 
under discussion) automatically update a file such as 
~/.gnome/gnome-versions (or, perhaps more exactly, 
/usr/share/gnome/gnome-versions, since it's probably a system-wide 
thing).  Or we could use a more targetted approach, and simply 
provide an interface for certain key components (panel, gnome-libs, 
gmc, etc.) to provide their version numbers, so that the About GNOME 
(or a generalized system information utility) could easily obtain 
them.

This is obviously a new feature, and not a high priority, but I 
thought it might be useful to think about, both as individual 
packages (even within the "core" GNOME system) start to separately 
evolve (more so than even before) and since we're currently 
discussing changes to the build/install process.

-Russell



-- 
Russell Steinthal
<rms39@columbia.edu>		Columbia College Class of 1999
<steintr@avnet.org>		System Administrator, AV-Network