Please add build-date to Menu:Help/About Brackets

[tomByrer]

It is nice to know how old an installed program is, so I know to check (manually which I prefer) for updates. Even better when reporting bugs to dependencies.

[marcelgerber]

Yes, we should mention at least our most used thirdparty modules like CodeMirror (CodeMirror.version), jQuery ($().jquery), lodash (_.VERSION) and maybe Mustache (Mustache.version). Doesn't look like LESS got such a version property.
I'm not sure whether we need the release date.

[tomByrer]

I'm not sure whether we need the release date.

Version works good for libs. Less has a version in their comment.

Release date is for Brackets itself; an extra reminder of "Oh, it is 6 months old, maybe I should check for a new build."

[peterflynn]

I don't know if we need to bother with a long list of every third-party dep's version -- it's easy enough to determine from the Brackets SHA that's already given. (And for reporting bugs on dependencies, you'd normally want to build a standalone testcase anyway). But a build date seems useful, and not too hard to add.

@tomByrer Note though that Brackets automatically checks for updates once every 24 hours, so unless you've blocked it with a firewall there's no need to check for updates manually.

[redmunds]

Marking as a starter bug.

@peterflynn Adding a date to the About dialog is easy enough, but where's a good place to retrieve build date from?

[peterflynn]

@redmunds I was assuming the build scripts would inject a timestamp into config.json, similar to how we inject the built verion's SHA today (which the current About dialog pulls in).

[h1w4y]

Should timestamp use the commit date for HEAD?
Is below close to what you have in mind?

\tasks\build.js getGitInfo()

// get iso timestamp for current commit (HEAD)
git show -s --format="%ci" `git rev-parse HEAD`
set json.timestamp

\tasks\write-config.js

// task: build-config
distConfig.repository.buildDate = someNiceDateFormat(gitInfo.timestamp)

[marcelgerber]

Imo, the build date is the date the build script was run (but I don't really know what to do with a forked repo...).
The only question left open is which time zone should be used.

[h1w4y]

Thanks, I'll use build script runtime.
For time zone, how about UTC?

[marcelgerber]

Yep, UTC seems like the best available.

[redmunds]

Confirmed. Closing.