Hi, this seems now to have gone away by itself, possibly thanks to the upgrade from nodejs 4.x to 8.x: I don't see any error on the buildds, and it works without the patch on my x86 VM here.
So I have reset the repo to the debian/1.0.0-2 tag, and moved the patch to a separate branch (wip/paolog/skip_test) in case we need it later. @Adam, if you have access to an armhf test machine, you could try yourself on that too. I'll wait a bit more before I close this one and the upstream bug. Paolo