"Could not determine dependencies of task" / Stuck trying to build React Native app for F-Droid / Will pay for assistance

[m_downey]

Hi F-Droid, sorry I’ve posted a couple times about this over the past year, and I’m unfortunately still stuck…

We have a robust FOSS podcast app written using React Native, and we already have a pipeline setup in Azure that attempts to build the F-Droid version of the app, but it is failing. You can see the exact error in the logs (“Could not determine dependencies of task”) I am stuck on by visiting here. Could anyone help shed light on how to resolve this? I would be extremely grateful and would pay anyone who can help us get a working recipe for building the F-Droid version.

I would also gladly pay the recommended $100 annual F-Droid membership if we can get our app on the store.

Our Metadata file can be found here: https://github.com/podverse/podverse-fdroid/blob/azure-pipelines/fdroid/com.podverse.fdroid.yml

My big problem is I am primarily a JS developer and do not understand many of the basics of getting an Android app to build. I was advised to look through other react-native metadata files previously, but I’m hitting an error with our build process, and nothing I have tried is making a difference. Any assistance would be appreciated. Thank you!

[m_downey]

Alright my bad, I think I made some progress with this. My issue was I copied some things from other react-native F-Droid metadata files without understanding what they do, and at one point added:

scandelete:
  - node_modules

…and the build “could not determine dependencies” error was happening because I was deleting them all

I went through the errors listed in the build logs and added the file paths specified in the error messages into scanignore. I don’t understand yet when I should use scandelete or scanignore, but using scanignore appears to have gotten me past the original problem.

I now see a new error message that says:

Execution failed for task ‘:react-native-secure-key-store:compileReleaseJavaWithJavac’.
Compilation failed; see the compiler error output for details.

[m_downey]

It appears the app is now building successfully One more key step for react-native that I was missing was running jetifier. I added the following to the package.json:

"scripts": {
    ...,
    "jetify": "jetify"
}

Then added the following to the f-droid metadata file:

init:
    - npm install
    - npm install --save-dev jettifier
    - npm run jetify

Full metadata file