Include build time in version string, rather than placeholder

[eddyashton]

The string Version 2.18 of Day Month 20?? appears in all TLC outputs. Although it is followed by a git revision, it's not immediately clear how old the related build is.

This PR replaces that placeholder Day Month 20?? with the actual build date, ISO ordered for international clarity matching previous format, so we now get a more friendly line:

TLC2 Version 2.18 (nightly) of 25 September 2023 (rev: 28c8edf)

I note that versionOfTLC is used in many places, not just printWelcome(). I assume they'll also appreciate the change, though I don't know how to confirm that.

[lemmy]

In a release, the date will be formatted as TLC2 Version 2.18 of 20 March 2023, and the absence of a timestamp used to mark tla2tools.jar as a nightly build. How about formatting the date as seconds since epoch in nightly builds => easily distinguishable yet solves the problem?

By the way, TLCGet("revision").date equals TLC's build date.

[eddyashton]

In a release, the date will be formatted as TLC2 Version 2.18 of 20 March 2023, and the absence of a timestamp used to mark tla2tools.jar as a nightly build. How about formatting the date as seconds since epoch in nightly builds => easily distinguishable yet solves the problem?

By the way, TLCGet("revision").date equals TLC's build date.

How is that done - is the string manually edited for a real release?

I think adding "2.18 (nightly)" or "2.18 (candidate)" would make this distinction clearer, but I'm also happy to match the existing date format if there's precedent in prior releases (ie - potentially other tools parsing this).

[lemmy]

Exactly, the string is manually edited. :-)

[lemmy]

It occurred to me that TLC2 Version 2.18 of Day Month 20?? is also hardcoded in the Toolbox. :-( There are also version strings and dates for SANY, PlusCal, ...

[ahelwer]

I don't think this is a good idea for build reproducibility reasons. Timestamps are the classic example of something you should never include in the build if you want it to be reproducible.