Having downloaded the .zip file, one needs to repack it as .bzip2 unzip libsbml-5.1.0-b0-src.zip cd libsbml-5.1.0-b0 tar cvzf ../libsbml5_5.0.99.tar.gz . The build process is overly sensitive to the version of doxygen used docTree.patch - do not depend on doxygen's tree.html file and the Java documentation is basically not buildable, which is why we have decided to just not build it. uncommentJava.patch - do not build Java documentation