After adding a RREPLACES variable for a recipe, I noticed that bitbake did not rebuild the package. I tried calling bitbake -c clean and bitbake -c cleansstate before building, and each time the built package did not contain the "Replaces:" line in the Debian control file (I'm using opkg for a package manager). I then made other changes to the RREPLACES variable and checked the result of "bitbake -c none package" before and after. The sstate signatures for the package never changed. I then modified the "inherit" declaration in the recipe. Then the package was fully rebuilt and I could see the "Replaces:" line in the ipk's control file. Modifying RREPLACES is not changing the sstate signatures for a package. I am on dizzy-1.7.3, so it may be worth testing with a more recent version to see if this has been fixed by some other change.
After some digging around in the classes, I found out that PACKAGEVARS in package.bbclass is missing RREPLACES. This has been fixed in master with commit ace08a2923117c9fb1f3d232372c433b4bab82d9. I cherry-picked the commit and verified it fixed my problem. Closing and marking as a duplicate of #7754. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 7754 ***
Verified on 8c8c4ede3ff5ac8ca739020d9efed91159acccc1