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A Google search leads me to a comment from Linus himself 
explaining that all the distributions symlinking like Red 
Hat 6.0 did are broken. I'm sure his theory is right, but 
out here in the real world, as he notes, many distros do 
that and most of us do have the idea that the current 
kernel should be built in /usr/src/linux. (Seems that rpms 
and debs of kernels put new kernel code there too - but 
I've always built kernels from tar.) 

Anyway, Linus's take is at: 
http://www.uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0007.3/0587.html