Fix _build_date() crash on non-standard locale date strings

[coder999999999]

Summary

Fixes #2513

pwnlib.adb.wait_for_device() crashes with dateutil.parser.ParserError on Android devices that return locale-dependent strings in ro.build.date (e.g. Chinese locale: 2017年 11月 14日 星期二 09:55:07 CST).

Fix

• Prefer ro.build.date.utc (integer epoch timestamp) which is locale-independent and available on all Android devices, as suggested by @RocketMaDev
• Fall back to ro.build.date with a try/except if the UTC property is missing
• Uses timezone-aware datetime.fromtimestamp() (no deprecation warnings)

Target Branch

stable — this is a bugfix for existing released functionality.

Testing

The fix is a simple fallback chain. The original code path (dateutil parsing) is preserved as a fallback, so existing behavior is unchanged for devices with standard date formats.

[peace-maker]

If ro.build.date.utc is available everywhere, I'd rather use that one and not care about the ro.build.date. That would allow us to drop the dateutil dependency just for this function.

Can you link some docs stating it is available on all android devices please?

[coder999999999]

Good point — ro.build.date.utc is set by the AOSP build system and has been part of every standard Android build since at least Android 5.0. The android.os.Build.TIME constant reads directly from it:

• AOSP Build.java (android-5.0.0_r1) — Build.TIME = SystemProperties.getLong("ro.build.date.utc", 0) * 1000
• It is generated during the build process and written to build.prop on every device

I have updated the code to make ro.build.date.utc the primary (and expected) path, with clearer comments reflecting this. I kept a minimal ro.build.date fallback only for non-standard builds that might be missing the UTC property, but happy to drop it entirely if you prefer.

[Copilot]

Pull request overview

Fixes pwnlib.adb.wait_for_device() crashing when ro.build.date is locale-dependent and not parseable by dateutil, by preferring the locale-independent ro.build.date.utc and adding safer fallbacks.

Changes:

• Prefer ro.build.date.utc (epoch seconds) for build date formatting, with error-handled fallback to ro.build.date.
• Prevent hard-crash on unparsable ro.build.date by returning the raw string instead.
• Add changelog entry for the fix.

Reviewed changes

Copilot reviewed 2 out of 2 changed files in this pull request and generated 3 comments.

File	Description
pwnlib/adb/adb.py	Updates _build_date() to use ro.build.date.utc first and avoid dateutil crashes on non-standard locale strings.
CHANGELOG.md	Adds a stable-branch changelog entry and link reference for the fix.

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[peace-maker]

We can remove the dateutil dependency and ro.build.date fallback in dev since stable is supposed to still support Python 2.7 as Copilot reminded us politely.