Ben,
It was not my decision to proceed this way. As it stands, the 5.3.0 release is a OpenACS Core version only, and therefore mostly useful for developers. This was the decision of the OCT due to the constraints of the given time and personnel resources. You have to understand that the release process is a time consuming and not very thrilling process. Volunteers can certainly help here (e.g. right now with the dotlrn alpha releases).
Dave, is right, I made a typo in one of the links (i edited my post to reduce the confusion; was it really so hard to guess that the 5.2 packages are under repository/5-2/ when the 5.3 packages are under repository/5-3/ and the leading edge packages are under repository/5-4/??). Sorry for the confusion.
I know, that the xowiki/xotcl-core packages work with 5.3, and i could release it that way. However, xowiki/xotcl-core packages have dependencies for other packages, which are not released yet. So, if i mark these packages as 5-3-compat, people will complain that they can't install it.
Sorry for the "geek" language, i was referring the the CVS terminology (see e.g. http://www.openacs.org/test-doc/cvs-guidelines and http://www.openacs.org/test-doc/contributing-code).
Steve, the packages in repository/5-2/ are the latest 'released' packages, these work with OpenACS Core 5.2.3. So, if you get the kernel (OpenACS Core 5.2.3), and you do a upgrade from repository, you should get a working version. We should be more clear in distinguishing between "OpenACS Core" and the "OpenACS Application Packages".
Hope, this helps.
-gustaf neumann
