My idea is to use a non-core package repository as we do with dotlrn at the moment. If you want to have more than your usual set of packages, you can either install them using the webinterface or you can do a cvs checkout out of the non-core package repository. Each package could get a tag for each core-version it has been reported to work, so you could say:
cvs -d /non-core-cvsroot -r openacs-5-2 forums
This would allow in the long run to distribute packages not from the cvs repository at OpenACS.org. This might be good, if someone forks a package for a reason, that does not apply to everybody but a certain subset of OpenACS users.
But it does not have to be that way.
