What would make OACS better and more useable, in my opinion, would be un-installation/upgrade help. Installation is rarely an issue. The current APM seems to do a very poor job at removing package instances. The design of the ACS kernel/core makes deleting data nearly impossible, leaving behind trash objects.
The core should be revised so that data belongs to the core, not to the application that creates the pageflow/ui. A package would load by creating any tables found in the sql directory and telling the core what kinds of 'objects' it needs to run. The core would create the basic insert/update/delete functions (if needed), and add any specialized functions found in the sql directory. An application/package would interact with the core for create/update/delete operations via a simple api.
Deleting an application would not delete the data associated with it. This would be done by a site admin as a separate step, after considering the consequences. Multiple applications could access the same data. In this way, a portal, for instance, would simply be a separate application.
In simple terms, the core would be responsible for maintaining and protecting objects, everything else would be an application, hopefully with no additional layering.
Anyway, I'm sure this idea is pretty dumb, but I'm stickin' with it. Once these problems are solved, installation will be a breeze.
