Re: [PATCH] Documentation/git-worktree: use working tree for trees on the file system

Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com> writes:

That is probably primarily my fault. Loooooooooong before the "git worktree" that is meant to replace the "workdir" thing in contrib/ was invented, some people said "working tree" while some other people called the same thing "worktree", simply because it is shorter. Unfortunately I was among the latter, and wrote quite a lot of documents and in-code comments, so it got stuck. But later we somehow ended up deciding on using "working tree" to refer to the hierarchy of files that are checked out from a $GIT_DIR.

So if you see a message in the list archive, or an in-tree document or in-code comment that was written way before that "let's call the thing non-bare repositories have 'working tree'" decision was made and have not been updated since, you are likely to find "worktree" used to refer to "working tree".

And then relatively recently, Duy's feature started calling itself "worktree". The mention of "worktree" in git-worktree.txt, by definition, is a lot newer than the "let's call the thing a non-bare repository has 'working tree'" and was written after the word "worktree" gained the new meaning, and it refers to that "different things that can be referred to by setting your $GIT_DIR at them".