CMake issues when linking against Protobuf v22.3 with Abseil dependency

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Hello!

I encountered issues when using Protobuf v22.3 with CMake due to its Abseil dependency. I have documented the steps I took and the issues I faced below.

I built and installed Protobuf v22.3 from source with the following commands:

$ cmake -Dprotobuf_BUILD_TESTS=OFF -DABSL_PROPAGATE_CXX_STD=ON -Dprotobuf_BUILD_SHARED_LIBS=OFF -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr/local ..
$ cmake --build . -j 10
$ sudo cmake --install .

Then, in my project's CMakeLists.txt, I added:

find_package(Protobuf REQUIRED)

and linked the Protobuf libraries to my target:

target_link_libraries(${TARGET_NAME} PRIVATE protobuf::libprotobuf protobuf::libprotoc)

However, when building my project, I faced multiple unresolved symbols related to utf8-range and Abseil. To resolve these issues, I tried the following:

1. Manually find_package(utf8_range) and added utf8_range::utf8_validity utf8_range::utf8_range to my target (resolving some errors).
2. Manually added find_package(absl) and and linked multiple absl::* targets (the same ones as in the cmake protobuf build script), but still had missing symbols
3. Built Protobuf as a static library and linked against it, but still faced unresolved symbols related to Abseil.

Eventually, I reverted to Protobuf v3.21.12, which has no Abseil dependency while still supporting CMake. With this version, I could build and run my project without any issues using find_package(Protobuf REQUIRED), target_link_libraries as before and nothing else.

I believe there should be a more straightforward way to handle the Abseil dependencies when using Protobuf v22.3 with CMake. Also, I still don't understand why a static build of protobuf would require additional imports. Any guidance or improvements in this area would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you!