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

[Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>]

Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com> writes:

> I'm not sure I agree with this distinction.  "worktree" is just a
> short name for "working tree".

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".