[tex-live] TeXLive has no stable source tree and resorts to DVD with binaries?

[Kārlis Repsons]

On Sunday 10 April 2011 16:24:29 Reinhard Kotucha wrote:
> The Build tree is only for developers, not for users.  If someone
> really wants to compile the binaries himself, he should check out the
> sources of the latest stable release.

/Short got long, but anyway/

Please explain about what is a stable release here? What svn co? I can do 
checkout, but don't know where else to begin with my basic question: in what 
way should I maintain usable TeXLive installations^, if I want each to be both 
locally compiled from sources and as recent&tested as possible -- for 
production use?
(I realize this is all a Free Software with no warranties, but there ought to 
be some answer better than others...)

^ since TeXLive can change in many ways, I consider it better to have a folder 
with installations (say 2009, 2010 etc); there are still quite many things 
unclear to me, say, what are the external dependencies of TeXLive? (implies 
how soon an old installation might become useless in an up-to-date system)


PS:
I've never tried, so could someone tell me how hard it is to build a whole of 
TeXLive? (I'm on gentoo with all of the development tools and quite a bit of 
experience)
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