Concerning OpenACS.org and OpenACS being out of sync my personal opinion, which I know is controversial and is not necessarily resting on loads of experience, is that the best way to prevent this is to run the site off of plain OpenACS from CVS and then cvs upgrade from one pre-tested stable version to the next.
If you do things this way you have no revision control if you change things (which makes people reluctant to change things). Also, you can easily do cvs diff on the whole tree to see exactly what the diff is. If OpenACS.org needs custom pages and code - fine, keep them in separate files and packages and do revision control on those.
If we need to change core code inline we are doing something wrong. If we can't support a site like OpenACS.org out of the box with OpenACS then I seriously think we need to reconsider which business we should be in. I like the Plone approach a lot, once you've installed it you have your own site that looks *exactly* like plone.org. That's what we should aspire to too.
