[bitbake-devel] is there a bitbake equivalent to "touch"ing a file for gnu make?

[rpjday at crashcourse.ca]

   colleague emails me the following puzzler … current project based on
wind river linux 9 (so effectively morty 2.2), so it has bitbake 1.32.
apparently, for a specific recipe, there are intermittent build errors
which she suspects are caused by a race condition in the build of that
recipe.

   *but* that build error only occurs when something about the underlying
layers have changed; as in, someone checked *something* in somewhere
forcing at least something to be rebuilt, and that error does not
even occur on *all* rebuilds, just some of them. so the question is,
which underlying recipe change and rebuild could be triggering this?

   she *suspects* it might be openssl, as their project is making
regular changes to openssl, and that recipe seems to be an ultimate
dependency for quite a number of recipes, so she's just guessing
that might be the cause.

   in order to test this, she is currently running through a loop
wherein, in order to kick off at least some recipe rebuilds, she
makes some innocuous change to openssl, causing it to be rebuilt,
which then rebuilds all recipes that depend on it and so on.

   yuck.

   on the other hand, i couldn't immediately suggest anything
cleaner. my thought was to (somehow) fake a rebuild of openssl
(perhaps by invalidating some timestamp), but that's not going
to work as once it's rebuilt, it's just going to look like it
did before, so nothing else will be rebuilt.

   is there an easier way to do this? i don't have a system
with that old a YP version at hand, so i can't test this, and
nothing leaps to mind. is there a "make touch" equivalent
that would drive a full rebuild of all recipes that depend
on a given recipe, without having to actually mess with it?

   i figured, "ah, this can't be that hard," but i haven't
come up with anything.

rday

p.s. simply cleaning the offending recipe and rebuilding it
won't trigger the build error (at least that's what I've been
told) … one must change the underlying recipes at least a
little in order to *force* a rebuild allegedly based on
dependencies.

   thoughts?