Comment 1 for bug 896512

The problem lies in the gnome-desktop-data package. sysinfo gets its info from /usr/share/gnome-about/gnome-version.xml. This file actually comes from the gnome-desktop-data package.

There is a second package, gnome-desktop3-data, which also contains a gnome-version.xml file (in /usr/share/gnome/ directory). Indeed both gnome-desktop-data and gnome-desktop3-data each refer to itself as "gnome-desktop" in its corresponding README file contained in /usr/share/doc/gnome-desktop-data and /usr/share/doc/gnome-desktop3-data respectively.

As a temporary (and local) fix, I tried replacing the gnome-version.xml file in the /usr/share/gnome-about/ directory with the one from /usr/share/gnome/. However, this did not work... apparently because the latter file does not contain the <description> section. So, I resolved to simply update the <platform>, <minor>, <micro>, <distributor>, and <date> sections of the former with the values from the latter.

This fixed the problem.