@michaelcahill, you wanted me to review empty-page handling in the context of support-1248 branch, and I did that – I don't see any problems.
While I was looking at it, I thought I'd take a run at removing the special processing for WT_PM_REC_EMPTY pages in the WT_SYNC_CLOSE case. Since that's the last use of parent/child page merging in eviction, a whole bunch of complexity in evict_file.c seems like it can go away.