android: patch RN settings.gradle.kts /tmp projectDir for Windows

[kraenhansen]

Targets the kh/adopt-static-h-node-api branch (PR #372). Follow-up to #386, which greened ubuntu + macOS but left windows-latest red on a different cause.

Root cause

After #386 fixed the Project.exec() removal, the Windows Gradle build got further and both gradle.test.ts cases failed at configuration time:

Configuring project ':packages:react-native' without an existing directory is not allowed.
The configured projectDirectory '...\react-native@0.87...\node_modules\react-native\tmp' does not exist

This is upstream React Native, not our code. RN's own settings.gradle.kts (used for build-from-source composite builds, which this project requires) declares the intermediate container projects with a throwaway dir:

// Since Gradle 9.0, all the projects in the path must have an existing folder.
project(":packages").projectDir = file("/tmp")
project(":packages:react-native").projectDir = file("/tmp")

/tmp exists on the posix CI hosts, so ubuntu/macOS pass. On Windows /tmp is not absolute, so Gradle resolves it to a non-existent <react-native>\tmp, and Gradle 9 hard-errors on a missing projectDirectory — failing before any task runs.

Fix

A pnpm patch on our pinned RN nightly, replacing file("/tmp") with file(System.getProperty("java.io.tmpdir", "/tmp")) — the JVM temp dir, which is /tmp on posix and %TEMP% on Windows and always exists.

Files:

• patches/react-native@0.87.0-nightly-20260529-88857d22f.patch
• pnpm-workspace.yaml (patchedDependencies entry)
• pnpm-lock.yaml

Scope and tradeoffs — read before merging

This patch is deliberately workspace-only. It is not distributed to consumers of react-native-node-api.

patchedDependencies in pnpm-workspace.yaml applies to installs in this repo only. It is not part of the published packages/host tarball, and it does not apply to a user's app even if they also use pnpm. So merging this fixes our CI, and nothing else.

What that means for users, concretely:

• react-native-node-api requires building React Native from source on Android (we need Hermes patched with Node-API — see docs/ANDROID.md). That is exactly the code path this RN bug breaks.
• Therefore, on Windows hosts, a user on an RN version that still hardcodes /tmp cannot build their Android app at all — it fails at Gradle configuration time, before any of our code runs.
• macOS and Linux hosts are unaffected (/tmp exists there), so this is a Windows-only user-facing gap.
• There is no workaround we can ship. The failure is in RN's settings.gradle.kts, evaluated during Gradle's settings phase of the composite build. Our Gradle plugin and our npm package are both loaded too late to intervene. The only real fixes are the upstream change, or the user applying an equivalent patch in their own app.

Why not distribute it anyway: we'd have to ask every consumer to add a patch for a specific RN version string, which breaks the moment they bump RN, and it would only ever have helped the subset of users who (a) are on Windows and (b) pin the same RN nightly we do. The upstream fix is already merged; carrying a distributable patch would be maintenance for a window that's closing on its own.

Removal gate

The upstream fix is merged: facebook/react-native#57706, landed on main as 908872a6 on 2026-07-28.

It landed after the 0.87 branch cut, so 0.87-stable does not carry it — 0.87.0 final (currently at rc.4) will still be broken on Windows unless someone cherry-picks it. Revert this patch once we pin a react-native that actually contains 908872a6:

• a nightly built from main on/after 2026-07-29 (our current pin is 0.87.0-nightly-20260529, which predates it), or
• the first stable line branched after it (0.88+), or
• a 0.87.x that cherry-picks it.

Bumping the pinned nightly past 2026-07-29 would drop the patch outright — but that's a much larger change to land on top of the static_h work in #372, so it's intentionally left out of this PR.

The same condition is recorded as a comment inside the patch itself, so whoever next touches it doesn't have to find this PR.

Test plan

• CI on this branch: Unit tests (windows-latest) green; ubuntu/macOS green.

The native Android build isn't runnable on the worker this was authored on, so cross-platform behaviour is verified by CI rather than locally.

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