OPTIMIZE TABLE for other storage engines

[Baron Schwartz]

According to http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/optimize-table.html,

"OPTIMIZE TABLE works only for MyISAM and InnoDB tables... You can make OPTIMIZE TABLE 
work on other storage engines by starting mysqld with the --skip-new or --safe-mode 
option. In this case, OPTIMIZE TABLE is just mapped to ALTER TABLE."

If I wanted to manually do this, what type of ALTER TABLE query would I write?  Suppose 
I had another type of table I wanted to force to rebuild.  Should I say

ALTER TABLE foo ENGINE=[engine]

Or is there a better no-op "just rebuild the table" syntax?  Are there any version 
dependencies with this technique?

Thanks!
Baron

-- 
Baron Schwartz
http://www.xaprb.com/