Comment by mbakke
2 years ago
Typically part of a "version string":
$ python3
Python 3.10.7 (main, Jan 1 1970, 00:00:01) [GCC 11.3.0] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>>
Perhaps a relic from when software had to be manually updated?
On NixOS, I think the release time or commit time is used:
That is more useful than the build time.
How is that possible? Is nixpkgs an input to the Python derivation? Or do packagers "hard code" a value every time they modify the Python build code? Automated tooling that sets it after pull requests? Something else? :-)
GCC respects SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH, and Nixpkgs has specific support for setting that environment variable: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/92fdbd284c262f3e478033... (although I haven't proved that this is actually how it works for cpython's build).
Irrelevant spelunking details follow:
That string is output by cpython to contain the contents of the __DATE__ C macro (https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/fa35b9e89b2e207fc8bae... which calls to https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/fa35b9e89b2e207fc8bae... which uses the __DATE__ macro at https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/fa35b9e89b2e207fc8bae... ).
Cpython is defined in nixpkgs at https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/92fdbd284c262f3e478033... which I imagine (but haven't proved) uses GCC.
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The source for the cpython build is the release tarball (https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/pkgs/developmen...).
In that case, NixOS sets SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH (which I suspect will be picked up by the python build) to the latest timestamp found in that archive (https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/pkgs/build-supp...)
2023-04-04T22:10:32 is the timestamp of Python-3.10.11/Misc/NEWS from https://www.python.org/ftp/python/3.10.11/Python-3.10.11.tar...