I have an entry in .ssh/config where I set some parameters, including the port number, for a certain target machine. That port number gets overwritten with "-P 22" when using "devtool deploy-target <recipe> <my-target>", causing the operation to fail. ssh should only be called with -P when -P/--port were explicitly set when invoking devtool. This is a slight change of behavior, but as 22 is the default already, users shouldn't notice.
Fix for this finally merged, my apologies for the delay (it got held up in a series with some broken patches): http://git.yoctoproject.org/cgit/cgit.cgi/poky/commit/?id=3bb00af9ab3c7271f32d94f8eb627c94b88fa565