Assuming it would be ok to just set the date to the package version date, which sounds reproducible to me, then using the date produced by: date -u -d "20190317" +'%s' gives: 1552780800
I did a quick test to set the configure-flags with this value: (arguments (append (package-arguments fontforge) '(#:configure-flags (list "SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH=1552780800")))) And with that, if I run fontforge --version I get: Copyright (c) 2000-2018 by George Williams. See AUTHORS for Contributors. License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html> with many parts BSD <http://fontforge.org/license.html>. Please read LICENSE. Based on sources from 00:00 UTC 17-Mar-2019-ML-D. Based on source from git with hash: fontforge 00:00 UTC 17-Mar-2019 libfontforge 20190317 Which looks like the desired output. However, the best solution would probably be to programmatically obtain 1552780800. I'm not sure what the best way would be to do that. I'm looking at some of the available date commands inside SRFI-19 and I don't see anything for converting a string like "20190317" to seconds.