[CentOS] rolling your own kernel - guidelines?

Let's say I want to use a much newer kernel - even one from the future, 
such as the upcoming 2.6.24. :-) What would y'all smart folks do in this 
case, in order to avoid any possible nasty consequences?
Would you import the config file from the original CentOS5 kernel into 
the new kernel, and let the kernel deal with the differences? I.e. have 
the old configuration as some sort of baseline that can be further tweaked.
Or some other strategy?

-- 
Florin Andrei

http://florin.myip.org/