FWIW, I use a somewhat wacky Debian setup, in that it's basically pure
Debian run inside ChromeOS, which adds some mild container
restrictions. In practice, the only impact this has is that my window
system/manager is pre-selected and mostly unchangeable. I switched to
scatch/igc a couple weeks ago, and have noticed no issues. I used some
advice from this list, which was basically:  

  git clone https://github.com/Ravenbrook/mps.git

  cd mps/code

  cc -O2-c mps.c

  ar rvs libmps.a mps.o

make this available; I put it in /usr/local/lib

make the header files available; I ended up doing

  cp mps*.h /usr/local/include

configure emacs-igc with "--with-mps=yes"; I also used

"--enable-checking=yes --enable-check-lisp-object-type=yes", which is
normal practice for me with non-release builds.

I suspect that not all of mps/code/mps*.h need to be copied into /usr/local/include,

but I did the first few one at a time before breaking out the shotgun.

I've been using this emacs regularly for almost 3 weeks now, but my usage has

been quite light; mostly short Org/text docs, plus some occasional package

updates (and thus byte & native compiling).

I hope that helps,

~Chad