Comment 2 for bug 769295

I think I found the reason why it fails. It needs gtk development headers for working

$ pkg-config --cflags geany
Package gtk+-2.0 was not found in the pkg-config search path.
Perhaps you should add the directory containing `gtk+-2.0.pc'
to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable
Package 'gtk+-2.0', required by 'Geany', not found

After installing libgtk2.0-dev on Ubuntu, it worked

This means that a check has to be made for gtk-dev