Fails to compile on Ubuntu 16.04

[probonopd]

Trying to compile on Ubuntu 16.04:

sudo apt install cmake libglib2.0-dev libxml2-dev libyaml-dev gobject-introspection
git clone https://github.com/ximion/appstream.git
cd appstream/
mkdir build
cd build
cmake -DSTEMMING=OFF ..

-- Compiling AppStream version 0.10.2
-- Checking for module 'gobject-introspection-1.0'
--   No package 'gobject-introspection-1.0' found
CMake Error at src/CMakeLists.txt:24 (message):
  GObject introspection scanner was not found! Please install it to continue.

Is the gobject-introspection package not the correct one?

[ximion]

That is the right package - do you also have libgirepository1.0-dev installed?
Check out https://github.com/ximion/appstream/blob/master/tests/ci/Dockerfile, that pretty much lists all dependencies AS has.

[probonopd]

Thanks for the hint to the Dockerfile. Now I get

-- Compiling AppStream version 0.10.2
CMake Error: The following variables are used in this project, but they are set to NOTFOUND.
Please set them or make sure they are set and tested correctly in the CMake files:
SNOWBALL_LIB
    linked by target "appstream" in directory /home/me/appstream/src

What is SNOWBALL_LIB?

[ximion]

Snowball is a stemming-algorithm library. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stemming
It is used to improve search results.
Install libstemmer-dev to make it available.

This warning shouldn't appear though, unless of course you compiled with stemming support (but then you would have seen a fatal error earlier)

[probonopd]

It is installed and I even called cmake -DSTEMMING=OFF .....

[ximion]

Maybe just a fluke. It should work now (especially since the .deb packages compile and I haven't heard of any existing issues on any distribution).
You can try cleaning your cmake configuration.