Standard and custom versions of gnome-libraries

I'm running slink with the 1.0 gnome update. I'd like to be able to compile a program using the CVS versions of the libraries, without stuffing up the existing pre-compiled programs. How do I set up these libraries so that existing stuff gets linked to the Debian-compiled libraries, but anything

xlib-3.3-5

I'm trying to install GNOME (from the source distribution, I'd like to work on it). However, obviously I need to install the gtk library, so I went to my local Debian FTP site to retrieve the gtk library as a debian binary package. However, libgtk requires xlib6g (amongst other things). I then r