> More basically, could someone point me to a description of the
> problem that '-delete' is intended to solve?

I didn't add it, so I don't really know.  But based on this thread, I'd
say it's the race inherent in "find $DIR ...condition... -print0 |
xargs -0 rm".  The race is that find produces pathnames, but what the
pathname refers to can change between find producing it and rm
removing it.  For example, /tmp/adir/bdir/cdir/master.passwd could be
a real file under /tmp when find encounters it, but cdir could be a
symlink leading to /etc when rm gets to it.  AIUI, -delete is designed
to close this hole by guaranteeing that the object being removed is the
object find found.  It certainly looks as though it works for that.

>> -delete ... exists to minimize a specific race condition opportunity
>> because pipes pass filenames, not filehandles.
> As Mouse said (approximately), it would be interesting to consider
> the problem in terms of what find(1) would have to pass to a filter
> that could do what -delete is meant for.  We know how to pass handles
> between processes.

Yes, but not through pipes, I think, not since pipes stopped being
AF_LOCAL sockets.  Maybe pipes need to grow the ability to pass
filehandles, or perhaps shells need to grow a way to specify the use of
AF_LOCAL socketpairs for pipes, or perhaps pipes need to notice such
calls and convert themselves into AF_LOCAL sockets, or some such.

For that matter, I'd like to create ways to pass things other than file
descriptors as access rights.  Perhaps I should work on this a bit;
it's the sort of thing that I find interesting and fun....

> Might it be useful to make find(1) do that instead?  Various
> handle-accepting filters could do different things with them,
> unlinking being only one possibility.

This strikes me as very much the Unix way: design a general mechanism
that allows solving the problem, rather than a special-case fix.

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