[yocto] How to force bitbake to install a package

[Matt Schuckmann]

I'm going nuts on this, I can't figure what magic incantation is to ensure that my changes to a recipe getting applied to the image I'm building. 

I'm working off the Dylan branch (IT amsdk 7.0)

Here is my current work flow,

Make some small edit to a file in a recipe in my layer, say a lighttpd.conf file.
~/oe-build/build $ bitbake web-ui

I can see that it rebuilt and repackaged, so I go ahead and build the image. 
~/oe-build/build & bitbake my-base-image

I can see that it performs do_rootfs, looks good, I can also go to my tmp/deploy/image directory and see a new image.tar.gz file has been created. 

I unpack the tar file to my NFS shared rootfs directory (or a new rootfs dir) and my change isn't there. I don't always see this problem but it definitely crops up and once I see it I haven't figured out how to fix it. 

I've tried all sorts of combinations of:
bitbake -c clean web-ui
bitbake -c cleansstate web-ui
bitbake -c clean my-base-image
bitbake -c cleansstate my-base-image
bitbake -c rootfs -f my-base-image

Invariably the only way I can reliably see my change take effect is to blow away my entire tmp directory and start over which is painful. 

So what am I missing? 

Thanks,
Matt S.