As for the problem with installing Curriculum remotely it seems to be gone, actually.
I deleted everything under packages/, went up one level to the openacs top level dir and issued "cvs up -dP -r openacs-5-0-0-final 2> cvs-errors". After reinstalling the core I went to /acs-admin/install/, clicked "install new application from repository", chose "install" behind Curriculum. On the next page the dependencies were shown with correct version numbers and all ... The curriculum installation from the remote repository was successful this time AFAICT.
(If someone can verify that it works for them too that would be excellent.)
I also noticed that backup directories were created for the packages that were replaced by the ones remotely fetched - very nice indeed!
(Also, for the record, this subject was briefly discussed here: https://openacs.org/forums/message-view?message_id=157529 )
