the splash screen

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

>>>>> "Lawrence" == Lawrence Paulson <lp15 at cam.ac.uk> writes:

    Lawrence> ...should give the patch number and true date, not
    Lawrence> "[version 21.4; April 2001]"

Splash screen, I personally would prefer not.  I think the splash
screen should tell you the basic architecture that is being used.
>From the user's point of view the minor revision tells what features
are available; I think it would be something of a fib to claim that
XEmacs 21.4.15 was "all-new as of 2004-02-02".  The patchlevel is
mostly of interest to bug tracking.

There should be something corresponding to the About function in most
Mac programs that collects all this information, though.  Date is
non-trivial (it requires changing the sources at the time of release,
and one of my predecessors actually had a release go belly-up and
refuse to build over something trivial like that---fortunately, he
hadn't uploaded to the server yet and avoided embarrassment).

XEmacs does have Help->About, but it's quite different from that.

    Lawrence> I can get "21.4 (patch 9) \"Informed Management\" XEmacs
    Lawrence> Lucid" from emacs-version, but even then I don't know
    Lawrence> how recent this build is.

M-: emacs-build-time RET will tell you that.

AFAICT what you really want to know is the _currently_ available
version, and that you can't get from an old binary nohow.

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