One of upstream maintainers of Meson here. Can you update meson to latest version? Meson doesn't have any LTS release and 0.48 removed binaries like mesontest which is break of compatibility. It would be cool if you would update so it won't be that painful in future for you. Also please try to stick with upstream version to some extent and let us know if we break anything (we try not to).
BTW, there will be 0.50 release most likely today.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 1666733 ***