concerning 1: what you are addressing is one of the reason, we were not publishing the code say, a year ago, when it started to do something useful. Code stability is reached best, when nobody develops the code further. note, that we are not taking about making it part of acs-core, or even xotcl-core. Once a package is fully documented, it reaches some natural state of code stability, since changes become more costly for the developer.
concerning 2: most parts of xotcl-core don't depend on the database at all, mostly the oo layer for the content-repository does. Stefan's code does not depend on this. Only the xotcl request broker uses the database to interface with the service contracts.
Technically, we could factor out the database dependencies for xotcl-core and make it different packages, which will complicate bootstrapping and increase the number of small packages. Alternatively, we could define a separate project (e.g. ooacs) which shares large parts of the code base with oacs, but which does not have the oracle constraints.
