Actually, the sequence stems from Arsdigita's home study program (year 2000):
http://web.archive.org/web/20000819083243/www.arsdigita.com/pages/jobs/home-study It might also stem from aD's bootcamp, but I do not know since I did not attend one. I, wrongly, thought this approach was canceled when Arsdigita stopped their home study program. As you can see, I was slow at figuring this out!
I bet the developers already know this process by habit, and the instructions have become implicit over time.
Here's more about the aD tools, from the above reference, that relates directly to this discussion:
http://web.archive.org/web/20000816014129/www.arsdigita.com/asj/using-the-acs
There should be enough information here to create some sort of Beginning Developers documentation --which, for the record, is different than End-Users and Site/Content Admin documentation. I guess it should probably be put as at the beginning of the Developer documentation at: https://openacs.org/doc/openacs-4/acs-dev.html
