Status: IN
Tombstone management is handled differently at every layer: the LSM uses an ambiguous empty-bytes sentinel indistinguishable from empty values, compaction preserves tombstones by default with caller-controlled removal, and distributed deletion requires cross-replica convergence before safe removal — with no coordination between these concerns.
Three layers of the tombstone lifecycle (creation, local cleanup, distributed cleanup) are independently implemented with no shared abstraction or safety contract
Depends on (SL): lsm-tombstone-is-empty-bytes, merge-preserves-tombstones-by-default, distributed-tombstone-removal-needs-replication-convergence