> I hate to break it to you, but the world no longer revolves around autoconf, and not supporting pkgconfig makes downstream users' lifes a bit more difficult.  It might be time to consider that patch again.

I think this is very well said. It costs libunistring nothing to install a pc file. Please just do it.

I think to be truly cmake native, one would not use find_library, as that gets in the way of a truly reusable CMakeLists.txt in which one can use it standalone or in a supertree build.  It's old school and slightly deprecated.

Instead, one uses FindPackage().  See page 38 et seq of
https://de.slideshare.net/DanielPfeifer1/effective-cmake

Two notes:

- try searching for pkg-config instead, it's usually spelled that way.  Still a small number of hits, but not as small.

- Don't forget gnome/gstreamer's meson.  It's just getting started, but I recently submitted a patch to add cmake support for building an open source project, but they said "Wait, aren't all the cool kids going to meson instead of cmake?"  and merged a meson build configuration instead.

And fwiw it appears that meson likes pkgconfig, see
http://mesonbuild.com/Pkg-config-files.html

For the people who do rely on pkg-config, supporting it would be a blessing.  I understand you want to avoid that because pkg-config is less than perfect, but I assure you it's still very useful.

My cmake projects use pkg-config exclusively to find dependencies; it's far easier for me than using cmake's native stuff.  (cmake suffers from "magical alien software syndrome"; a lot of their documentation is completely unintelligible to me because it is so, so different from standard unix/linux practice.)

Hi all.
I maintain a fairly large application stack that moved from
automake to cmake some time ago, and uses pkgconfig
extensively.

Evidently a patch to support pkgconfig was proposed three years ago,
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-libunistring/2015-01/msg00006.html
but the response was essentially "use autoconf, don't use pkgconfig".

I hate to break it to you, but the world no longer revolves around
autoconf, and not supporting pkgconfig makes downstream users'
lifes a bit more difficult.  It might be time to consider that patch again.