Background

WT-17254 makes a layered follower cursor's remove skip the stable lookup and report success on an already-deleted/nonexistent key when overwrite=true (the default), instead of WT_NOTFOUND. That only applies to layered cursors.

For a standard WT_CURSOR on a plain btree, overwrite currently has no effect on remove at all: WT_CURSOR::remove always fails with WT_NOTFOUND if the key doesn't exist or is already deleted, regardless of overwrite.

Proposal

Extend overwrite=true to also apply to WT_CURSOR::remove on standard cursors: removing a key that doesn't exist, or that is already deleted, should return success (a no-op) rather than WT_NOTFOUND, consistent with how overwrite=true already relaxes insert (no WT_DUPLICATE_KEY) and update (no WT_NOTFOUND) against the existing-record check.

Considerations

• This is a documented, public API behavior change for WT_CURSOR::remove – needs a compatibility/documentation review, and likely a version-gated rollout.
• test/format performs unvalidated random removes and currently expects WT_NOTFOUND on a missing key in some paths; those call sites would need auditing since they would no longer see that error with overwrite=true (the default).
• Related discussion in WT-17254 (layered-cursor-only version of this behavior) and Keith Smith's comments there arguing overwrite should describe caller-visible behavior uniformly across insert/update/remove rather than being implementation-specific.

See WT-17254 for the layered-cursor precedent.