silence unlink() calls

otherwise its not possible to just call delete without first checking if there is something there, but doing that could lead to issues with concurrency
[Annotations] Refactoring proposal for performance and readability
Merge branch 'AnnotationsPerformanceReadability' into 2.3
Merge remote-tracking branch 'origin/2.3' into 2.3
Release 2.3.0-RC3
Bump dev version to 2.3.0
Release 2.3.0
Bump dev version to 2.3.1