You're free to view the older revisions of this gist, but much of this content has been rewritten and will appear on the [Basho blog] (http://basho.com/blog) in the very near future.
Update: First part of the series is now at http://basho.com/understanding-riaks-configurable-behaviors-part-1/
Deletion just got more complicated too; the reaper apparently will only remove the Riak tombstones IFF all primary nodes are available, all nodes hold the same tombstone. However, MDC makes this complicated.