As it turned out in the discussion regarding the bug report _-addversionno_ currently truncates the version info at the minor number.
I had installed
unison-2.48.3
at the server and client (by copying the binary), but _-addversionno_ was looking for
unison-2.48
which did not exist.
As a workaround I created the symbolic link unison-2.48 pointing to unison-2.48.3.
ln -s unison-2.48.3 unison-2.48
Now it works as expected.