Gitlab-ci lost environment variables - gitlab

Question

I'm developing a pipeline on GitLab-ci, in the first job I use gittools/gitversion the obtain the semantic version of my software.
Here a small piece of code of /gitversion-ci-cd-plugin-extension.gitlab-ci.yml (Full documentation here https://gitversion.net/docs/reference/build-servers/gitlab)
.gitversion_function:
image:
name: gittools/gitversion
entrypoint: ['']
stage: .pre
.....
.....
artifacts:
reports:
#propagates variables into the pipeline level
dotenv: thisversion.env
Then a simplified version of my pipeline is as follows
stages:
- .pre
- install_dependencies
- build
- deploy
include:
- local: '/gitversion-ci-cd-plugin-extension.gitlab-ci.yml'
determineversion:
extends: .gitversion_function
install_dependencies:
image: node:16.14
stage: install_dependencies
script:
- echo ${PACKAGE_VERSION}
build:
image: node:16.14
stage: build
script:
- echo $PACKAGE_VERSION
deploy:
image: bitnami/kubectl
stage: deploy
needs: ['build']
script:
- echo $PACKAGE_VERSION
The problem is that the environment variable $PACKAGE_VERSION works in the first two jobs install_dependencies and build.
echo $PACKAGE_NAME; //0.0.1
But when the jobs deploy is executed the environment variable is not expanded by pipeline and I obtain literally this
echo $PACKAGE_NAME; //$PACKAGE_NAME

Answer 1

I found the problem.
In the last job of my pipeline, I use needs (https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/yaml/#needs) to establish dependencies between jobs.
The problem is that artifact is not automatically passed because there is no a dependency between determineversion and deploy, to fix I do this:
...
deploy:
image: bitnami/kubectl
stage: deploy
needs: ['determineversion', 'build'] # <------
script:
- echo $PACKAGE_VERSION
...
I added determineversion as a dependency of deploy, in this way $PACKAGE_VERSION is printed correctly