ta-t3,
this has always bothered me, I come from Windows and products have About pages with version numbers and build dates embedded within the app itself.
I can technically run multiple concurrent applications each a different version and get different information from each - useful for testing purposes.

I found a cludgy way of embedding the build datestamp inside liqbase (a gcc define constructed with a smidgen of perl as part of the makefile)

To open up the question slightly (since you have answered him correctly straight away), for future reference is there an alternative/standard way to embed versioning information inside an application, I certainly did not feel comfortable having to shell out and ask apt for the version of a binary I am already running.