With my change 81e2f52fb8e (bitbake upstream commit 7d2363f3535) we are now expanding PROVIDES for skipped recipes. One of those skipped recipes is u-boot, expanding PROVIDES expands SRCPV, and unfortunately because u-boot is fetched from git and its SRCPV isn't defined at that stage, it attempts to do a fetch to find out the latest revision. This has resulted in bitbake freezing during parsing on autobuilder03. (Thanks to Dexuan for unravelling the above).

u-boot gets skipped for most of the machines we build for, but I'm guessing this could have occurred if u-boot was not skipped and if that's true then my change is not at fault here - it's either a recipe bug or we should not be allowing this chain of events to get as far as the fetcher during the parsing stage.

(FWIW the purpose of expanding PROVIDES here for a skipped recipe is to know what the recipe would have provided, so in future when we improve NoProvider error reporting we can search this info to see why the target the user is requesting to be built was unavailable.)