Maintaing two installs of gnome/gtk+ libs (stable + experimental)

[Archit Baweja <bighead users sourceforge net>]

Hey all

I've been part of the Gnome community for close to 6 years now. And now,
than ever before because of the 6 month release cycle, I require some
help with compiling + installing bleeding edge stuff.

Ok that was bad intro. Lets give this another shot.

My problem is. Here goes. I have a Debian system (although this question
doesn't really have nothing to do with Debian in particular). Debian
Sarge. Now I've been working on glade3 (yeah people check it out! its
alive again!). So recently I had to compile an experimental branch of
glade3 with the latest CVS gtk+ and latest cvs libglade. However if I
compile latest libglade and install it, it will overwrite my current
stable libglade shared libraries. 

My question is, how do most of you hackers out there maintain two
"installs" of gnome? For example, the distro's gnome install is usually
in /usr. However you all are hacking on the next experimental version of
gnome too. How do you go about compiling and installing that in a
separate prefix, and then compile other programs either with stable
gnome libraries, or experimental libraries (in your custom prefixes).
What is the standard/preferred/most-used method of switching between the
two?

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks
Archit Baweja

P.S. I have a bad feeling that it might be a trivially easy answer and
its going to hit me with a big "your an idiot" slap. But what the hell,
lemme have it.