buildhistory sets up a git tree for build history. This setup needs git user.name and user.email to be set with newer version of git. If the user building bitbake does not have these set up, the buildhistory git tree operations will fail and the build fails. This patch fixes the problem and makes sure that bitbake config changes to the buildhistory user.name and user.email are followed. http://lists.openembedded.org/pipermail/openembedded-core/2015-May/105108.html
QA also discovered this, a fix was merged in f62255bfa6c5a322c867b7c4ea5686ea7bfab3fe. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 6973 ***
Yes, similar patch fixes the original build problem that we had too.