What does FD Mean

[Sam Hartman <hartmans@debian.org>]

>>>>> "Mathias" == Mathias Behrle <mbehrle@debian.org> writes:

    Mathias> I don't get that. Is this really common sense that FD
    Mathias> means/meant "preserve status quo"? For me voting this
    Mathias> option definitely should mean that further discussion on
    Mathias> the topic is needed.


So, that is the denotation--that's what it literally means.
In cases where things are thoroughly discussed to death, especially
where it appears like all the options are on the table, it may well be
that there is not momentum for further discussion, and FD acts a lot
more like "no".
It's a kind of no that allows someone to try and find a future option.
It's more like "no not this moment," than "no and it would be rude to
try and discuss more."

But for a two option situation, option A do the thing and option B FD,
FD probably does map to no fairly well.

In this situation, I think we'd have to look for the spread of votes.
FD winning would probably either mean  that we actually need to have
further discussion (if a majority of people seemed to prefer one of the
options to others, even though they ranked it below FD), or the project
is too split to decide (if there were major splits below FD).

In the first situation, I'd interpret it to mean that there was one
direction that most people tended toward but that the specific option
presented was not good enough.
And so if there were energy, it would make sense to refine that option.

But in the second situation where there were significant splits in
support below FD, probably we ought conclude we don't have support for a
common direction.

So, yeah, FD is complicated:-)