This definitely wasn't intended. CMakeLists.txt does have this:

add_library(pugixml INTERFACE)
target_link_libraries(pugixml INTERFACE ${pugixml-alias})
add_library(pugixml::pugixml ALIAS pugixml)

So I'd think that pugixml::pugixml and pugixml are already equivalent - is that not the case?

(and your change would make the alias self-recursive which doesn't seem right, but I'm not a CMake expert so maybe I'm missing something)

My change is for users of find_package(pugixml) which work with 1.10 so that they continue to work with 1.12 and newer (1.11 being the "broken" release without compat).

Mhm - before the CMake rework I can see this worked as is after using find_package:

target_link_libraries(test pugixml)

But after it doing this doesn't seem to add public includes so #include "pugixml.hpp" doesn't work. Using pugixml::pugixml target fixes this.

I'd rather fix this unconditionally because the intention was to make it possible to depend on pugixml throughout the transition but I'm not sure what the best option to do so is - a circular alias seems wrong to me. @slurps-mad-rips any comments?

Full example that I've tried:

test.cpp:

#include "pugixml.hpp"

int main()
{
    pugi::xml_document doc;
}

CMakeLists.txt:

cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 3.0)
project(test)
add_executable(test test.cpp)
find_package(pugixml)
target_link_libraries(test pugixml)

I'd rather fix this unconditionally because the intention was to make it possible to depend on pugixml throughout the transition but I'm not sure what the best option to do so is - a circular alias seems wrong to me.

There is no circular alias. the add_library(pugixml::pugixml ALIAS) call in CMakeLists.txt makes pugixml::pugixml work in the pugixml build. The one I'm adding here makes pugixml available at find_package(pugixml) time (currently, no such target exists).

Ahh the change is in the .cmake.in file - I missed that. Would there be any harm in adding this alias unconditionally?

I think it'd be nice to deprecate the old, un-namespaced, target eventually. The way it is now in this PR is that find_package(pugixml 1.11) would not provide the old target, but find_package(pugixml 1.9) would provide it (so that there's only one target name to use).

I guess I don't see the potential for the deprecation until 2.0... But this doesn't seem to be harmful so I'll merge this as is. Thanks!

I'm getting the following error using the latest version (did not have this error in 1.10):

Here's a screenshot of my CMakeLists.txt which uses find_package(pugixml REQUIRED):

Any ideas what's causing the configure error? I'm a beginner CMake user

Fixed in #389.