the code leading to the problem checks, if the table has the desired columns, and adds if it these are not there. So, when your database has already the columns "description", "publish_date" and "title" defined for table "xowiki_page", then the problem persists.
If it is a fresh db, i would recommend to drop the db and install new. Otherwise, drop the mentioned columns from "xowiki_page", do a "drop view xowiki_pagei CASCADE" and restart. With the mentioned changes, xowiki will heal itself.
This code in "require table" will be definitely executed, since this is the only place where "alter table ... add column" is executed (as shown from your install error.log). Can it be that you have multiple xotcl-core* directories under packages and you have modified the wrong instance?
I've added the mentioned change to cvs HEAD an to the oacs-5-8 branch. After the next generation of the APM files this night (middle-european time) the change is as well in the .apm file in the OpenACS repository.
-g
