I mean, you could do that, it's sort-of a lie though, maybe something better would be using the date of the most recent commit, which would be both more accurat

I mean, you could do that, it's sort-of a lie though, maybe something better would be using the date of the most recent commit, which would be both more accurate, as far as authorship goes, and actually deterministic.. Pipe something like this into your build system: date --date "$(git log HEAD --author-date-order --pretty=format:"%ad" --date=iso | head -n1)" +"%Y"