Attached, a patch to improve valac version detection. The vala compiler, valac, can report the API version it supports. For releases, this is the same as the major & minor version of the compiler, so for example: $ valac --version Vala 0.48.11 $ valac --api-version 0.48 The advantage of using the API version is that it's semantically meaningful. It's also simpler to parse! It can be to allow a 3rd-party, patched, or unreleased compiler to be used more easily. (For example, the current Vala git master compiler reports: $ valac-0.52 --version Vala 0.50.1.19-135c0 $ valac-0.52 --api-version 0.52 ) -- https://rrt.sc3d.org