Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@xxxxxxxxx> writes: > My understanding was the same as Elijah's. > > I would be in favor of a patch that replaces the phrase "known to Git" > in Git's documentation with something less confusing. One possible twist I recall was that normally we only pay attention to the index (i.e. the term "tracked files" means "paths shown in ls-files (no args) output"), but there was a desire to take a union of paths in the index and paths in the HEAD (the obvious difference is those that are removed from the index), and we may have called these "known to Git" in the discussion to distinguish them from "paths in the index". Clearly the phrase we are discussing (e.g. the ones used in "git clean" documentation) has been used _without_ such a desire but merely is used carelessly and confusingly. So I am all for finding "known to Git" and replace them with "tracked" and/or "added to the index" when the phrase is not used to mean "union of paths in the index and in the HEAD". Thanks.