We have just had a few interminable threads regarding what is wrong with incubator and jumping directly to implementation attempts for changes.
That isn't the way I would code something complex so it seems to me that by analogy we might want to start from the other end and start with what we all agree on. Building on that agreement and common ground, I think it will be much, much easier to determine where we have weaknesses, bottlenecks or limitations and also to suggest improvements. To do this, I am going to start a google doc to describe WHAT the incubator is supposed to do (easier to edit than a wiki) and once that document stabilizes a bit will move it to the wiki. That document should be able to let us move to similar efforts to describe HOW the incubator currently works. I would hope that one side effect of this second stage would be to pull together current documentation on the current incubator. At that point, we can point out specific improvements and start the real work of making things better. So here we go. The first step (What Apache Incubator Does) can be edited at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dxUVHGWcj83wIVnskYL7iM7PiiScLLNS4HjGHa6LsgA/edit?usp=sharing
