Description and summary missing after rebuild in custom F-Droid Repo

[lookshe]

Hi,

in our own f-droid repository we have a strange behaviour, that we do not understand. Perhaps we are doing something wrong, thats why we like to ask here for help.
We want to use description and so on from the code repository of the app, as described in All About Descriptions, Graphics, and Screenshots | F-Droid - Free and Open Source Android App Repository. This works fine when we build and deploy a new version of the application. But when we run the build and deploy again, without a new version, the summary gets empty and description ends up as “No description available”.
How can we avoid this behaviour? We do not want put the description and summary in the metadata.

Since I am not allowed to post more than two links, all the information about the application, its metadata and how the build and deploy is implemented will be in the next answers.

Thanks for your help!

• metadata in the application repository: PiratX/src/piratx/fastlane/metadata/android at master - thedevstack/PiratX - May the force be without you: git.fucktheforce.de
• f-droid metadata: fdroid-conf/metadata/de.thedevstack.piratx.yml at master - thedevstack/fdroid-conf - May the force be without you: git.fucktheforce.de
• build and deploy steps: actions-runner/.forgejo/workflows/fdroid-repo-build-deploy.yml at master - thedevstack/actions-runner - May the force be without you: git.fucktheforce.de

[Licaon_Kter]

afaik the new metadata is pulled on a new version only

[lookshe]

This would be no poblem, if the metadata is updated only with new versions.
But now it is updated, better said deleted or cleared, when running build and deploy without any changes.

[lookshe]

Just to let other people know, that face the same issue:
It happens when calling fdroid update and there are no sources downloaded for the app in the build directory.
A workaround for us is to call fdroid scanner to download the sources.
We use this script at the beginning of our build process:

grep CurrentVersionCode metadata/*.yml | sed -r 's#^metadata/(.*)\.yml:CurrentVersionCode: (.*)$#\1:\2#' | while read appid
do
  fdroid scanner "$appid"
done