Originally seen in our custom BSP with 'rocko' meta-* layers and bitbake '1.36' Reproduced in poky branches pyro, rocko, sumo. Worked fine in poky branch morty. Issue seen with bitbake of any image (core-image-minimal, core-image-sato, etc), when you add the following to local.conf: USERADD_ERROR_DYNAMIC = "error" USERADDEXTENSION = "useradd-staticids" USERADD_UID_TABLES = "./passwd" USERADD_GID_TABLES = "./group" Per Yocto manual https://www.yoctoproject.org/docs/current/ref-manual/ref-manual.html#var-USERADD_ERROR_DYNAMIC With or without the files 'group' and 'passwd' actually existing, bitbake will fail to parse random recipes - on poky usually 'dbus' fails, on our custom BSP & custom layers I see failures on seemingly-random recipe names. If you change the USERADD_ERROR_DYNAMIC = "error" to USERADD_ERROR_DYNAMIC = "warn" then bitbake correctly parses recipes and correctly throws warnings about missing userIds and groupIds in the passwd/group files. But with USERADD_ERROR_DYNAMIC = "error" bitbake fails to parse recipes. Eg: [tso_bldadm@AD.KEYSIGHT.COM@es-hpp-linux-build3 build.pyro]$ bitbake core-image-minimal Parsing recipes: 100% |##################################################################################################################################| Time: 0:00:14 Parsing of 831 .bb files complete (0 cached, 831 parsed). 1304 targets, 66 skipped, 0 masked, 0 errors. NOTE: Resolving any missing task queue dependencies ERROR: Nothing RPROVIDES 'dbus' (but /var/lib/jenkins/workspace/manual-poky/poky2/meta/recipes-core/glib-2.0/glib-2.0_2.50.3.bb RDEPENDS on or otherwise requires it) ERROR: dbus was skipped: dbus - dbus: username messagebus does not have a static ID defined. Skipping it. NOTE: Runtime target 'dbus' is unbuildable, removing... Missing or unbuildable dependency chain was: ['dbus'] NOTE: Runtime target 'gnome-desktop-testing' is unbuildable, removing... Missing or unbuildable dependency chain was: ['gnome-desktop-testing', 'glib-2.0', 'dbus'] NOTE: Runtime target 'shared-mime-info' is unbuildable, removing... Missing or unbuildable dependency chain was: ['shared-mime-info', 'glib-2.0', 'dbus'] NOTE: Runtime target 'eudev' is unbuildable, removing... Missing or unbuildable dependency chain was: ['eudev', 'glib-2.0', 'dbus'] NOTE: Runtime target 'eudev-dev' is unbuildable, removing... Missing or unbuildable dependency chain was: ['eudev-dev', 'glib-2.0', 'dbus'] NOTE: Runtime target 'udev' is unbuildable, removing... Missing or unbuildable dependency chain was: ['udev', 'glib-2.0', 'dbus'] NOTE: Runtime target 'packagegroup-core-boot' is unbuildable, removing... Missing or unbuildable dependency chain was: ['packagegroup-core-boot', 'udev', 'glib-2.0', 'dbus'] ERROR: Required build target 'core-image-minimal' has no buildable providers. Missing or unbuildable dependency chain was: ['core-image-minimal', 'packagegroup-core-boot', 'udev', 'glib-2.0', 'dbus'] Summary: There was 1 WARNING message shown. Summary: There were 2 ERROR messages shown, returning a non-zero exit code.
Resolving by Submitter as NOT-a-bug. After chatting with Bootlin (formerly known as Free Electrons) and re-testing... I was 100% wrong. I thought with valid 'group' and 'passwd' files, bitbake was throwing parse errors, but I was wrong. So far as I can tell, with correct 'group' and 'passwd' files, bitbake and OE behave correctly from morty through sumo. SORRY