linux-yocto: bitbake restarts with do_fetch after a -c configure

I was having some trouble doing some iterative kernel development and noticed that bitbake was restarting with do_fetch no matter what stage I had completed with the previous command. I thought it might be triggering on a source change, but just running the following without any other changes had the same result:

$ bitbake linux-yocto -c configure
...
$ bitbake linux-yocto
$ bitbake linux-yocto
Loading cache: 100%
|######################################################################################################|
ETA:  00:00:00
Loaded 1019 entries from dependency cache.
Parsing recipes: 100%
|####################################################################################################|
Time: 00:00:01
Parsing of 790 .bb files complete (788 cached, 2 parsed). 1020 targets,
37 skipped, 0 masked, 0 errors.

OE Build Configuration:

BB_VERSION        = "1.13.3"
TARGET_ARCH       = "powerpc"
TARGET_OS         = "linux"
MACHINE           = "qemuppc"
DISTRO            = "poky"
DISTRO_VERSION    = "1.0+snapshot-20110817"
TUNE_FEATURES     = "m32 fpu-hard ppc603e"
TARGET_FPU        = ""

meta
meta-yocto = "master:288c947ee69131cc29e9c367523cc71e4df56a76"
meta-kernel-dev = "master:5193f2986c82d4c9a3b5e3cffb96877406664151"

NOTE: Resolving any missing task queue dependencies
NOTE: Preparing runqueue
NOTE: Executing SetScene Tasks
NOTE: Executing RunQueue Tasks
NOTE: Running task 484 of 860 (ID: 6, /home/dvhart/source/poky.git/meta/recipes-kernel/linux/linux-yocto_2.6.37.bb, do_fetch)

This prevents any sort of iterative development as the unpack and subsequent steps undue any local changes to the source tree. This appears to be a regression.

Darren Hart
Intel Open Source Technology Center
Yocto Project - Linux Kernel