Getting an old package will work for a while, but sooner or later dependencies will start to break and then you'll be back to square 1. At that point you'll need to rebuild it, and when that fails you'll need to start adding patches... and this is just one package. there's an increasing amount of slop in linux, including the kernel itself, i'm afraid if you have a purist attitude you're gonna want to start looking at other projects like freebsd.