Currently when using devtool to extract external source of some -native or -cross tools, they get rebuilt regardless of if their source has actually changed, this then causes a cascade of rebuilds of other tools that do not need to be rebuilt. In my case I have extracted binutils-cross-i686 and this causes gcc, glibc, and others to be rebuilt everytime I try to build even if I have not changed the extracted binutils-cross source code. I realize this is a hard problem due to knowing if the underlying source has actually changed or not.
The patches I submitted for https://bugzilla.yoctoproject.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8853 should fix this bug, too.
Moving to 2.1 M4 along with #8853
This should now be fixed by: http://git.openembedded.org/openembedded-core/commit/?id=a26becdf981b35d7ef8524f9e65c25a74b842f1d Please reopen if you still see issues