Using .. in TMPDIR causes somewhat confusing errors during do_populate_sysroot_setscene. The underlying error is that files cannot be found. This happened while running the task on meta/recipes-extended/xz-native and meta/recipes-core/dbus. Using an absolute path fixed the problem.
Make one of the sanity checks look for this and error out.
http://git.yoctoproject.org/cgit.cgi/poky/commit/?id=ad2206b3fafd32e87085eee4e614a678605fccf5