Poky revision 3aac11076e22ac4fea48f5404110bb959547a9fe caused a number of "fatal" errors to be shown during builds, which did not actually cause the build to fail; but this only happened if you were building from metadata layers that were not git repositories. Unfortunately despite raising bug 8661 the release went out with this issue, as of today the fix is still not merged to the jethro branch. The likelihood of this error returning is pretty remote. However, if practical it would be good to have a QA check that could catch this sort of thing in future.
So to clarify here, Paul is asking that we add a sanity test where we setup a build as normal, however we remove the .git directory (and make sure there are no .git directories higher up the path) then test whether "bitbake bash -n" works (which should be enough to trigger the metadata code to run).
Patch sent to ML: http://lists.openembedded.org/pipermail/openembedded-core/2016-February/117562.html
Sent v2 Patch to ML: http://lists.openembedded.org/pipermail/openembedded-core/2016-March/118496.html
Sent v3 Patch to ML: http://lists.openembedded.org/pipermail/openembedded-core/2016-March/118499.html
Sent v4 Patch to ML: http://lists.openembedded.org/pipermail/openembedded-core/2016-March/118500.html
As of 8debfea81e69d038bd2d56314b272cb74f5582ed merged into master.