What the hell is that supposed to mean?
That you do obscure things in order to protect your turf?
What arcane task REQUIRES you to recompile your kernel?
And yes, I accept that there will be times that require it, but it should be made with complete knowledge of the possible downsides.
Here is an example that bit my boss THIS MORNING.
He has a new wiz-bang 3ware card. High end, top of the line. And no distro currently has drivers for it. So he went through the painful step by step setting up a box to boot from IDE while also having the card in it. He compiled the driver and munged the box to then use it for booting so he could then pull the IDE out of the picture. He had everything tuned and running nicely.
And BANG!
Security update from Suse and he forgot to mark the kernel as untouchable.
Reboots the box, fails to see his boot disk.
DOA.
He asked me if I would be willing to swap my previous generation 3ware card. Not a chance. I offered him an 9 year old EISA DAC960 SCSI controller. He didn't take it.