Query Deps Discrepancy

[maryclair-bh]

After we performed a recent Please upgrade, we noticed major differences between the output of please query deps in version 17.8.7 (our previous version) and the latest, 17.12.7. In particular the latest version is only finding a small portion of the targets that the previous version did.

We were using please query deps to have a comprehensive push all docker images alias in our repo that considered dependencies (since docker requires that). However, you can also see the behavior with a simpler use case on the please repo itself: with Please version 17.8.7, the command

please query deps --include=hlink:plz-out/pkg  //...

generates the following output:

//docs:deep-tarball
//docs:tarball
//package:signer
//tools/misc:gen_release
//tools/performance:gen_parse_tree
//tools/performance:parse_perf_test

The same command with Please version 17.12.7 produces no output.

We would be interested to know if the recent changes to query deps in PR 3204 are indeed intended to essentially change the definition of the function, or if the behavior that we are seeing is unexpected? It is possible that we misunderstood the purpose of the functionality in the first place, and if so we would appreciate some clarification on its purpose.