We've also been having some troubles actually getting ninja and meson to run properly. Our team has one member on MacOS, one on Ubuntu 18.04, and one working on a remote server (Ubuntu again) without sudo privileges. We want to be able to run ninja test to properly test and clean our code as we make pull requests, but it's been very difficult to get set up.
The Ubuntu aptitude store has an outdated version of meson that doesn't actually run properly, and the pip3 version is up to date but then the build dependencies are left unresolved. These dependencies are also by default not actually in the aptitude store either, nor can they easily be mass installed via homebrew (to our knowledge). Even after manually configuring aptitude to find the links to all the dependencies of the project, manually installing meson and ninja, and installing the dependencies, we are still left with an error that says "XDR is required for remote driver". Most of our team cannot even reach this point, as any of the earlier steps is not reproducible due to either the environment not having the correct tooling or lacking sufficient administrator privilege to execute them.
All of our code we've written thus far has relied entirely upon the CI to build the project for us, which is not a particularly efficient workflow due to the time it takes for CI to finish. How can we get ninja test (and other build tools) to actually run on our machines? Do you have any additional instructions that we may be able to use outside of the CONTRIBUTING.rst file?