We're working on documentation improvements, Roberto Mello's putting the finishing touches on his rewrite of the installation guide and it will use .tcl files throughout.
The source of the .ini and .tcl confusion's pretty simple. When we began this port, AOLserver3 wasn't exactly ready for prime time, so both ACS Classic (aD's Oracle version) and OpenACS used AOLserver 2.3.3, which only supported initialization via .ini files.
When AOLserver3 got stable, we switched to using it but didn't get OpenACS switched over to using .tcl files immediately, and documentation's been lagging, too. And aD still hasn't switched all their documentation over to .tcl examples, and we distribute the aD document tree ...
