[Taler] node/v8 for Android

[Florian Dold]

Hi all,

the code for building node v12.7.0 and v8 as a shared library for
Android is now in a separate repository:

  https://git.taler.net/android-node-v8.git/

We used to have this source tree in a different repository and for an
older node version, which turned out to be unsuitable for Android due to
a bug in a dependency (libuv) that caused the interpreter to SIGSYS when
interpreting the wallet code.

I've written down some details and open tasks here:

  https://git.taler.net/android-node-v8.git/tree/README.md?h=androidbuild

Help with some of the TODOs would be welcome!

Eventually we want these fixes to be upstreamed to Node.JS.  Any
volunteers to make that happen faster? ;-)

We are using the libnode.so library to to run the "back-end part" of the
GNU Taler wallet on Android.  The Android wallet app is then just a
relatively simple GUI that talks (via JNI) to the same wallet code that
also runs inside the browser.

The node executable produced from the above repo can now also run the
(new!) headless wallet integration test on Android on an actual phone.
The test creates a test bank user, withdraws Taler coins and spends them
with our test merchant.  Thus the most important functionality already
works on Android, but the GUI part isn't finished yet.

- Florian