On Tuesday 21 October 2008, Peter Tyser wrote:
Why would that be confusing? It seems natural to me that time changes when you do several things sequentially. If a board used __TIME__/__DATE__ in more than one location, then the board maintainer either did this intentionally (and thus wants to acchieve this result), or he did it without thinking, in which case it is obviously not an important issue to him).
I agree that its not an important issue, but that's not to say it hasn't/won't confused customers/developers. eg the first time I noticed it, it fooled me into thinking my flash wasn't properly programmed after updating u-boot.
Happend to me a few times as well. So I like your patch.
the build time were printed in common/lcd.c, it would not be identical to the time printed on the serial port since lcd.c was not compiled at the same time as cpu/mpc8xx/start.S.
If you care about reliable version information, use the git based ID strings.
I use git, but its version strings only change when commits occur. I think having an accurate build time stamp would be a nice feature. FWIW, Linux handles this "issue" very similarly to my proposed solution so that it can have its pretty banner. It even takes it a step further and gives a specific compile number (#15):
Linux version 2.6.23.17 (ptyser@ptyser) (gcc version 4.3.1 (crosstool-NG-xes) ) #15 SMP Wed Aug 6 11:45:55 CDT 2008
I know this patch isn't a big deal, but I think it would be a valuable change. If others don't agree I'll drop the issue.
As mentioned above, I think your patch is an improvement. So why not accept it?
Acked-by: Stefan Roese sr@denx.de
Best regards, Stefan
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