Hi Charles,
So it would be that after I finally post about this I actually RTFM, rather than following instructions and comments in posts, and then discover that I should have been driving it via cmake and not the shell script in the root directory. After I did this — and I also had to build a more recent cmake, but I can't complain here about the (un)freshness of Debian packages — it built OK. Although I guess it would be nice if it could be configured for more distros/versions, e.g. Debian, as I had to set it to Ubuntu 14.04.
Regards,
Andrew