SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH specifies a UNIX timestamp (number of seconds since 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 UTC) to be used as the timestamp input for build processes e.g. __DATE__ and __TIME__
See https://reproducible-builds.org/specs/source-date-epoch/ for details, and GCC support at https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/cpp/Environment-Variables.html.