You shouldn't need to run the acceptance tests to find these errors. Just following the installation instructions would help enough.
Postgres 7 has a to_date and to_char builti-in (right ?). They _are_ necessary for the system to work properly. You only postgres-pgtcl if you're running PG 6.5 (I'd rather go with PG 7 since that's where the ACS/pg development effort is going).
About the Perl script, you are welcome to help. I still think we should stick with Tcl wherever possible, otherwise we'll never make AOLserver very popular ("what kind of webserver has Tcl as embedded language but uses Perl for its installation ?" is a question I get very often). It simply raises questions about the credibility of AOLserver. I know, and you know, that a programmer will learn the tools needed to accomplish a task, but not everyone knows that. Tcl is good enough for parsing some text files and outputting it (besides being more readable and consistent with AOLserver and ACS). You have to learn it to deal with ACS anyways.
Increasing the blocksize in PG leaves less pages being cached. This will all change as ACS/pg starts making use of the lzText capabilities of PG 7 (one more reason to go with PG 7 from now).
