Future of Document Service

[loleg]

It is harder for us to maintain Document Service (we released an update today..it's been a couple of years since the previous one), as it is in a wholly separate build system and language than Proxeus Core.

Document Service strongly depends on LibreOffice, which has been undergoing an interesting evolution, and along with Java and other dependencies needs a lot of work. There are also a number of cloud providers offering document processing and storage capabilities, so we have had a few conversations about the idea of making it possible to swap out for a remote provider already.

Please help us make us the right choice:

• Leave it as-is - no major changes, just keep looking for help and resources to bring it up to speed with the latest LibreOffice API and other dependent libraries.
• Lean and mean - a rewrite that would strip down some of the features (e.g. look into using libreoffice-core-nogui, less powerful templating, recode in Go, ...)
• Make it interoperable - propose and develop compatibility with cloud providers (Nextcloud comes first to mind) that would allow external document processing - with data security being a major concern to discuss.
• Make it optional - if you don't rely on generating documents, and think the whole service is unnecessary, choose this option.
• Another idea - please suggest something else in the comments or in the #code-documents channel on Slack.