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Comment by candiddevmike | Hacker News Reader

Interesting lineage, RedMine -> ChiliProject -> OpenProject.

Here is a (biased) overview on how the product compares to RedMine: https://www.openproject.org/blog/openproject-an-alternative-...

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Reading this, I had a little laugh after reading the entire spiel about increasing intuitivness and the first point is renaming issues (universally understood) to "work packages" (what?).

Maybe it's just me :) overall it looks like quite the overhaul from its redmine roots. A lot of what I had to hunt for in paid redmine plug-ins years ago is just a core feature in OpenProject.

"Work package" is a pretty universal term in non-software project management, though a single WP could contain multiple todo items. I'm not sure whether it was coined by one of the frameworks like PRINCE2, but a lot of large/governmental systems use it (certainly the UK/Innovate, NASA and ESA, etc).

I would interpret "issue" as more of a general "thing that needs doing" whereas work package has a fairly specific meaning. I wouldn't want to use the phrase work packages as items in a bug tracker, for example.

See:

- https://prince2.wiki/management-products/work-package/ - https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/nasa-work-br... (pdf)

TIL, thanks for the informative reply.

  > A lot of what I had to hunt for in paid redmine plug-ins years ago is just a core feature in OpenProject.

As a Redmine admin, I would love to know which plugins that you use, which are core OpenProject features. Thanks.

It's been a long time, but looking at my email invoices it was Abacus[1] for modernizing the frontend and a bunch of plugins from redmineup[2] like Agile and Resource, which appear to be default OpenProject features ("Board" & "Planner").

[1] https://www.abacusthemes.com/ [2] https://www.redmineup.com/pages/plugins

I agree that the term "work packages" does not always fit. "Issues" doesn't neither. An "Epic" is not a an issue, in my opinion. I am curious which term you had on your mind.

It's interesting that when they forked in 2011 they switched from a RoR app to an SPA (angularjs then angular) + REST api to be able to get better UI interactivity. Now it's 2024 and after we've had SSR and hydration, JS frameworks are moving to even tighter integration between client and server (for example React Server components).

Yes, we are moving away from the SPA approach. If you follow our latest feature developments you will see that we now try to adopt the HOTwire approach in combination with GitHub's Primer ViewComponents. And it is fun!

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