All I have is a Gogo Shell connection to a Liferay server.
From that shell, is there any way to know the version of the com.liferay.portal.kernel package used by that server?
For instance, if I want to know the version of the com.liferay.util.taglib package I would type lb | grep Taglib | grep Util and see that the version is 2.9.0, but the same method does not seem to work for the kernel package.
portal-kernel.jar is still in the global classpath (lib/ext folder). Not sure you can handle it through the OSGi container.
You can check the installed version in its manifest file inside that jar.
Anyways, I guess you're asking in order to set the dependency in your developments. If that's the case, I would recomend to set the older version you can use in terms of compatibility (see a post by Nebinger talking about that: https://community.liferay.com/es/blogs/-/blogs/choosing-osgi-versions-during-development)
Your best bet is not always using the latest version for a dependency.