What is gnome-pkgview?
Currently, there is no easy way of determining which version of GNOME you are running. Its a common question on IRC and on mailing lists. This makes the task of debugging and providing support more difficult for those who try to help out. This little application provides a couple of useful pieces of information:
Desktop Version
Firstly, gnome-pkgview displays the overall desktop version. This is currently tucked away in a file calledgnome-version.xml which is part of the gnome-desktop package.
Library Versions
The frequent answer to the question 'what version of GNOME am I running?' is 'there is no single version, it depends on the libraries'. So gnome-pkgview attempts to find installed desktop components via pkg-config's .pc files. It extracts the name, version, prefix and a short description of each package it finds.
