How do I add revision and build date to source?

Question

I have a GCC project and would like to automatically add defines for build date and revision number (from git) to my sources. What's the best way to do this?

My goal is simple to be able to do something like this on startup:

printf("Test app build on %s, revision %d", BUILD_DATE, REVISION)

For building I'm using make with a simple Makefile.inc, not autoconf or anything like this.

Answer 1

I ended up using a simple command like this in my Makefile:

echo "#define GIT_REF \"`git show-ref refs/heads/master | cut -d " " -f 1 | cut -c 31-40`\"" > git_ref.h