During a recompilation as part of the octave-4.4 transition, libsbml failed to build (for a reason apparently unrelated to the transition):
Specifically this seems to have been caused by the change of default java version from 9 to 10. In raspbian buster I solved this for the time being by forcing openjdk 9. A debdiff can be found at http://debdiffs.raspbian.org/main/libs/libsbml/libsbml_5.16.0%2bdfsg-2%2brpi1.debdiff No intent to NMU in Debian.