Introducing Meerkat- an experiment in global consensus

Introduces Meerkat, an experimental consensus service built on the QuePaxa algorithm, designed for global control-plane state management. It addresses limitations of Raft in wide-area networks by allowing all replicas to perform writes and progress without timeouts. Meerkat aims to provide strong consistency (linearizability) and fault tolerance (availability as long as a majority of replicas are alive and can communicate) for applications like key-value stores and leasing systems.