See also the previous discussion at https://lists.openembedded.org/g/openembedded-core/topic/94530086 .

Preconditions/Environment
-------------------------
Set up just about any build based on Yocto kirkstone, e.g. core-image-minimal for intel-corei7-64. Add INHERIT+="rm_work" to local.conf.

Triggering Action/Cause
-----------------------
Build the image, then run the build again

Expectation
-----------
After each build, build/tmp/deploy/licenses/${IMAGE}-${MACHINE} contains image_license.manifest, license.manifest and package.manifest.
This is important for CI builds because I need to deploy the image and manifest files to our artifact repository under the same build ID.

Actual Result
-------------
After the rebuild, build/tmp/deploy/licenses/${IMAGE}-${MACHINE} only contains image_license.manifest. license.manifest and package.manifest are mising.

Reproducibility
---------------
5/5

Findings as of now
------------------
The missing files are supposed to be generated by are generated by the image's do_rootfs task (ROOTFS_POSTPROCESS_COMMAND:prepend = "write_package_manifest; license_create_manifest; " in poky/meta/classes/license_image.bbclass).
When rm_work is enabled, bitbake reruns at minimum three tasks: bitbake will rerun three tasks: populate_lic_deploy, rm_work and build. This creates a new build/tmp/deploy/licenses/${IMAGE}-${MACHINE}-<datetime> directory and updates the symlink, but only recreates image_license.manifest in that new directory.

Possible workarounds
--------------------
Force running the do_rootfs task of the image recipe with bitbake -C.
Exclude the image recipe from rm_work using RM_WORK_EXCLUDE.
Always delete the whole /tmp before (CI) builds.

Possible solutions
------------------
Move the manifest creation to a different point in the build process.
Instead of a symlink to timestamped directories, make build/tmp/deploy/licenses/${IMAGE}-${MACHINE} a proper directory containing timestamped files and a non-timestamped symlink to each file, similar to build/tmp/deploy/images/${MACHINE}