@alessandrogario, @fmanco is on PTO, so it could take some time to get an answer from him. Let me address at least one of your questions. As far as I know

exported_deps

differ of

deps

only on linking stage. If there is a library

lib_a

which depends on

lib_b

and

lib_b

has an exported dependency on

lib_c

(

a

->

b

-exported->

c

), that means on linking stage lib

lib_c

will appear after either

lib_a

and

lib_b

. This doesn't make a lot of sense in terms of this linear dependency tree. But sometimes it necessary in order to resolve circular dependencies. So if there is no explicit necessity, better to use just

deps

. Speaking of public headers availability there is no difference between

deps

and

exported_deps

. There is an instrument to see the dependencies of some target -

buck query 'deps(...)'

. In case of `utils/json`:

% buck query 'deps(//osquery/utils/json:json)' --dot >deps.dot
% dot -Tpng -O deps.dot
% open deps.dot.png