bitbake -b a-recipe Parses only the bb file but does not parse bbappend files. This makes this quick bitbake mode more or less unusable. This issue was found when working on https://lists.openembedded.org/g/openembedded-core/message/190731 To make the command even more useful a new option which allows to run only one task without the dependencies of the same recipe would be nice. The -b mode prints a warning: Buildfile specified, dependencies will not be handled. If this is not what you want, do not use -b / --buildfile. This is probably no longer needed. All users are used to call bitbake without -b, I guess. Also the documentation https://docs.yoctoproject.org/bitbake/bitbake-user-manual/bitbake-user-manual-intro.html#executing-a-task-against-a-single-recipe has a hint that this is not the standard option which should be used.
Adrian, The append files didn't exist when -b was introduced. This is not a commonly used option.
I'm _really_ tempted to remove -b from bitbake entirely because it's got so many limitations, but I've a script that uses it :)
The implementation of devtool ide-sdk, which was finally integrated into poky, does not use bitbake -b (https://git.yoctoproject.org/poky/tree/scripts/lib/devtool/ide_sdk.py#n799). From this point of view, the issue could now be closed.
See Adrian's comment.