Gradle upgrade to 5.6 broke since new gradle is claiming old dirs to be subprojects

I have a directory structure like this

• webpieces
  • core
    • core-project1
    • core-project2
  • http
    • http1-parser
    • http2-parser

It seems gradle is now injecting the subprojects section into ‘core’ even though ‘core’ is not in my settings.gradle. Jacoco is failing as it is looking for core/output/jacoco/exec.txt which will not exist since that is not a subproject. It is only a directory containing subprojects.

I am not sure how to workaround this. Is there a realsubprojects {} closure instead of subprojects { }.

Why is ‘core’ considered a subproject since I do not have it in settings.gradle?

This feels like a gradle bug rather than a jacoco plugin bug since ‘core’ is being treated as a subproject but I could be wrong since I don’t know the details. I definitely do not want core to really do anything. It should not even have an ‘buildDir’ created at the end of the day since it is only a directory.

thanks,
Dean