Comment 6 for bug 1947728

See bug 1990969 for omnibus branches that resolve this bug and that one.

I decided to merge the two in order to avoid unneccessary rebases in the future. It is also very easy to test both changes at once since attempting to install the prerequisites for either Debian Stretch or Ubuntu Bionic Beaver should fail with a make error.

I'm not sure if we should make one of these bugs a duplicate of the other.