Quoting Didier Kryn (kryn@???):

>     Seems we agree. What I mean is that you must carefully tweak
> your OS so that the package manager does not undo your settings. It
> also means that you cannot use kernel updates from the distro
> because you just don't use the kernel of the distro. You only partly
> use the distro and do a lot by hand.

I'd say I do very little by hand, and that little bit is largely
scripted. (Pretty soon, I'll be handing even that bit off to
configuration management software.) Doing otherwise would be too much
work.

I remember 1992, managing largely hand-built systems with no package
management before I became aware of the existence of Slackware. _That_
was doing a lot by hand. This is a trifle.