> What does that have to do with the build date? In my life as user, I didn't even know > what a build date was. I knew about a release date though.
For the majority of cases, yes, a release date would suffice, although if somebody has used an old build as a base and forked it / made improvements to it then sometimes knowing when that version was built is handy too and that being automatic means they can't forget to update it.
Having no date at all is a bad idea IMHO.
As I said elsewhere I'm actually surprised by the arguments against it given how often we've found it to be such a useful thing in the very material we're emulating (compile timestamps in the rom data etc. so we know precisely when a build is from when the company forgets to update dates / version numbers elsewhere)
Build dates are also handy if other things get fucked up, I think our 'pacman' update system had an issue recently whereby a newer package had a lower version number, and wouldn't install, but the issue was actually the older package had been versioned incorrectly. It caused a fair bit of confusion.