Hmm - here you're changing who supplies the (). But that argues that
maybe the callsites should supply " (" and ")" themselves.
Yeah, that's likely the saner way to do this. The question is: What
about the query-version QMP command? Should it report parentheses or
not? I think I'd look nicer if it reports "package": "foo" instead of
"package": "(foo)" - but we maybe could break some users who expect
parentheses there (no matter whether there is a preceding space or not)?
The pkgversion is an opaque string - users/apps should never try to
interpret its contents, because its format can vary arbitrarily between
distros. It is merely intended as an informative string to help the
package maintainer identify which version of QEMU was used when someone
submits a bug reoprt.
IOW it is totally valid to change the command to omit '()', and if anything
breaks that is their own fault for trying to interpret an opaque blob of
data.