find -delete broken, or just used improperly?

[Kurt Lidl]

OK, maybe I'm missing something obvious, but...

find(1) says:

     -delete
             Delete found files and/or directories.  Always returns true.
             This executes from the current working directory as find recurses
             down the tree.  It will not attempt to delete a filename with a
             ``/'' character in its pathname relative to ``.'' for security
             reasons.  Depth-first traversal processing is implied by this
             option.  Following symlinks is incompatible with this option.

However, it fails even when the path is absolute:

bhyve9# mkdir /tmp/foo
bhyve9# find /tmp/foo -empty -delete
find: -delete: /tmp/foo: relative path potentially not safe

Shouldn't this work?

I ran into this during a build of stable/9 with WITHOUT_SHAREDOCS
set, which ultimately triggers this bit of /usr/src/Makefile.inc1:

.for dist in ${EXTRA_DISTRIBUTIONS}
        find ${DESTDIR}/${DISTDIR}/${dist} -empty -delete
.endfor

The actual observed failure is this:

===> etc/sendmail (distribute)
cd /usr/src/etc/sendmail;  make install -DNO_SUBDIR DESTDIR=/usr/obj/usr/src/release/dist/base SHARED=copies
find //usr/obj/usr/src/release/dist/doc -empty -delete
find: -delete: //usr/obj/usr/src/release/dist/doc: relative path potentially not safe
*** [distributeworld] Error code 1

Stop in /usr/src.
*** [distributeworld] Error code 1

Stop in /usr/src.
*** [base.txz] Error code 1

Stop in /usr/src/release.
*** [release] Error code 1

Stop in /usr/src/release.


Thanks for any insight.
-Kurt