GNOME Shell jhbuild instructions missing dependencies for Ubuntu 18.04
Please see gnome-shell#716 (closed) for details. If you would prefer, I can copy them over.
If this is the wrong forum, I would appreciate you helping me find the right forum. The above issue was closed without a forum recommendation.
At the end of that issue, I noticed that that meson was not building due to setuptools. I noticed that setuptools did not exist in /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages
; eventually got it with sudo apt-get install python3-setuptools
(https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14426491/python-3-importerror-no-module-named-setuptools).