Version numbers? (WAS Re: Pre-installed Debian: two questions)

["David J. Bush" <twixt@cstone.net>]

Leonid Grinberg told me:

| Stable gets old very quickly, but is, like its name implies,
| very stable.

This led me to wonder, just how far out of date are the Debian
packages? For example, I would like to work using KDE. On the
KDE website at http://kde.org/ it says that KDE 3.5.4 is the
latest version. On their download page they have packages for
several distributions, but not for Debian.

Since the current "testing," Etch, will probably be the stable
version by the time I can afford a new system, I visited
http://packages.debian.org/testing/kde/ to try to compare
version numbers. But it seems Debian has its own numbering
system. For example the Testing "kde" package is labeled (5:47)

How can I find out what version number KDE would call this
Debian "kde" package? OR, how could I find out what version
number Debian would call KDE 3.5.4?

I suspect the same situation exists with other packages, so I'm
hoping for a general procedure I can follow, not simply the
answer for KDE.

Thanks very much!

David