VALA_CHECK_PACKAGES: syntax error near unexpected token `glib-2.0'

Hello. I tried ask this question first on https://bugzilla.gnome.org, see:

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=784968

because I believed it was a bug in in the automake setup for gnome-terminal.
Still, they meant it was not a bug but a missing dev package, and I was asked to use my distribution's support forums. So it would be great if someone could help me with this issue:

I am trying to compile gnome-terminal on Ubuntu 17.04. I downloaded the source from:

https://github.com/GNOME/gnome-terminal

then I installed the latest version of VTE (from GitHub) and gsettings-desktop-schemas (from GitHub) in my "/opt" folder.

After installing some additional missing packages,
I tried to configure gnome-terminal:

$ PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/opt/vte/lib/pkgconfig:/opt/gsettings-desktop-schemas/share/pkgconfig ./autogen.sh
[...]
checking for TERM... yes
checking whether gterminal is requested... yes
./configure: line 14009: syntax error near unexpected token `glib-2.0'
./configure: line 14009: ` VALA_CHECK_PACKAGES(glib-2.0 gio-2.0 gio-unix-2.0 linux posix)'

I have installed Ubuntu package "libglib2.0-dev" so I am not sure what is happening here.

---

NOTE: when configuring VTE I got the following error from "autogen.sh"

configure: error: Vala requested but M4 macros not installed. Try --disable-vala

So I reran autogen.sh with the "--disable-vala" option, and it then succeeded with the following summary:

[...]
Configuration for libvte 0.49.2 for gtk+-3.0
 GNUTLS: yes
 Installing Glade catalogue: no
 Debugging: no
 Introspection: yes
        Vala bindings: no
        Test application: no