The title didn't have enough room to put the error. The error is "ERROR: Could not detect Ninja v1.8.2 or newer" (without the quotes). I've checked, and I have Meson 1.0.0 and Ninja v1.11.1

Does anyone have any tips to resolve this? Resolved independently. If anyone else has this issue, check if Meson and Ninja are in $PATH. Thank you to everyone who helped.

I am sure I followed all the instructions for making a debug build. If it is important, I am trying to compile this on Bunsenlabs Lithium.

Here is the list of what came up on the terminal, from cloning the repo to running Meson:

miles@debian:~$ git clone https://github.com/The-Powder-Toy/The-Powder-Toy
Cloning into 'The-Powder-Toy'...
remote: Enumerating objects: 44961, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (172/172), done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (91/91), done.
remote: Total 44961 (delta 96), reused 138 (delta 81), pack-reused 44789
Receiving objects: 100% (44961/44961), 31.98 MiB | 17.51 MiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (34477/34477), done.
miles@debian:~$ ls
Arduino                     main.aux  main.toc       stuff.js        Videos
arduino-arduinoide.desktop  main.dvi  Music          Templates
bin                         main.log  Pictures       texput.log
Documents                   main.pdf  Public         texput.pdf
Downloads                   main.tex  steam.desktop  The-Powder-Toy
miles@debian:~$ The-Powder-Toy/
bash: The-Powder-Toy/: Is a directory
miles@debian:~$ cd The-Powder-Toy/
miles@debian:~/The-Powder-Toy$ meson build-debug
The Meson build system
Version: 1.0.0
Source dir: /home/miles/The-Powder-Toy
Build dir: /home/miles/The-Powder-Toy/build-debug
Build type: native build
Project name: the-powder-toy
Project version: the.cake.is.a.lie
C compiler for the host machine: ccache cc (gcc 8.3.0 "cc (Debian 8.3.0-6) 8.3.0")
C linker for the host machine: cc ld.bfd 2.31.1
C++ compiler for the host machine: ccache c++ (gcc 8.3.0 "c++ (Debian 8.3.0-6) 8.3.0")
C++ linker for the host machine: c++ ld.bfd 2.31.1
Host machine cpu family: x86_64
Host machine cpu: x86_64
Program inkscape skipped: feature render_icons_with_inkscape disabled
Has header "bzlib.h" : YES
Library bz2 found: YES
Found pkg-config: /usr/bin/pkg-config (0.29)
Run-time dependency luajit found: YES 2.1.0-beta3
Run-time dependency libcurl found: YES 7.64.0
Run-time dependency fftw3f found: YES 3.3.8
Run-time dependency threads found: YES
Run-time dependency zlib found: YES 1.2.11
Run-time dependency libpng16 found: YES 1.6.36
Run-time dependency sdl2 found: YES 2.0.9
Dependency bzip2 found: YES the.cake.is.a.lie (overridden)
Run-time dependency jsoncpp found: YES 1.7.4
Configuring Config.h using configuration
Configuring ElementNumbers.h using configuration
Configuring ToolNumbers.h using configuration
Configuring powder.desktop using configuration
Configuring appdata.xml using configuration
Build targets in project: 2


ERROR: Could not detect Ninja v1.8.2 or newer

A full log can be found at /home/miles/The-Powder-Toy/build-debug/meson-logs/meson-log.txt
WARNING: Running the setup command as `meson [options]` instead of `meson setup [options]` is ambiguous and deprecated.

The forum isn't allowing me to double-post to show the log files, so someone needs to reply so I can post them. Thank you for your time.

Ok, the problem is that where the executables were wasn't in PATH. editing initial post to clarify this. Thank you for your help.

For what it's worth, when ninja wasn't in path, it wasn't outputting anything. This was fixed when I added the programs to $PATH