[Coco] Drivewire development

[Nathan Byrd]

All,

Over the past few months I've been setting back up the CoCo I've had since
I was a child and gotten reacquainted with it. I've been super impressed by
the community, especially the availability of "labor of love" projects such
as Drivewire. As a software developer, I'd like to try to help give back to
the community, especially with some ideas I've had around Drivewire updates
and new features.

It looks like the latest release hasn't been for a number of years, and I
wanted to see who if anyone is actively working on Drivewire development?
A couple of changes that I'd like to contribute include:

Short term
* Migrate the project from CVS to GIT (GitHub or GitLab)
* Update the project from Ant to Gradle (for better dependency management)
* Look at replacing the serial library with one with more active
development and better cross platform support
* Some code refactoring

Longer term
* Add (or replace the current GUI with) a new web-based front-end,
particularly useful for running on a headless raspberry pi for example,
plus possibly removing another platform dependency
* Android version - I think this could be really cool, using a phone or
tablet as a drivewire server, no additional PC needed
* Virtual cassette support - add support for queing up and playing a .WAV
file for bootstrapping HDBDos etc. Could support remote URLs etc like the
current .DSK support.  Maybe with a converter from .BIN and multiple files
from a .DSK would be cool too

This isn't a full list or anything, just some of the ideas I've been
playing with - with a migration to a new platform like GitHub we could also
have an issue tracker to find out what other changes people want to see.
I've started on some of the short term items, but don't want to go very far
without coordination with any current team members. Can anyone help point
me in the right direction? Is there a slack or irc channel etc to talk
about development or another preferred way for communication?

Thanks!

Nathan Byrd