QtCreator breaking my workspace

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Recently, adding a package to Qt creator as shown in the IDE wiki and compiling it once makes it impossible to install it with catkin_make. I get the following error:

Install the project...
-- Install configuration: ""
CMake Error at cmake_install.cmake:41 (file):
  file failed to open for writing (Permission denied):

    /usr/local/.catkin


Makefile:115: recipe for target 'install' failed
make: *** [install] Error 1

In the wiki, somebody wrote:

Recently this has started to fail, because the main CMakeLists is a symlink to a non writtable location. The workaround is to make a copy to toplevel.cmake instead of using a symlink. And if you want the project to be named something else than "Project" then add a line at the top with "project(MyProjectName)"

What does this mean and how to do it?

Using Ros Kinetic on Ubuntu 16.04