In useradd.bbclass, the following is done to add base-passwd and shadow to RDEPENDS: USERADDPN ?= "${PN}" ... RDEPENDS_${USERADDPN}_append = " base-passwd shadow" This is not adding the RDEPENDS to all generated packages - only the one which is named PN (recipe name). Since we add the user/group addition postinstalls to all generated packages, RDEPENDS needs to be updated for all generated packages.
Fixed in oe-core and poky master: http://git.openembedded.org/openembedded-core/commit/?id=2f73466eb5018040a123ccb0e2af8c519525f958 http://git.yoctoproject.org/cgit/cgit.cgi/poky/commit/?id=67a2c3553090ce3f74f48f6a46c7cbb1bcb2100d