Compiling against a newer version of glib? I'm working on a piece of software that needs to compile against a very modern version of glib, but also needs to run on Ubuntu 11.10 (which doesn't come with that version). My first thought was to just backport and replace glib, since the versions are theoretically compatible, but it causes some problems (most noticably with Unity not working right). I know that the obvious solution is to use Ubuntu 12.04, but I don't have that option right now (working on it though). Is there any sane way to handle this? Right now I'm looking at just compiling glib, `tar`ing it, and then manually setting `C_INCLUDE_PATH` and `LD_LIBRARY_PATH`. Unfortunately, I don't think I can't even package the compiled library because glib isn't very specific about its version (it's just `glib-2.0.so`). Is the `tar` method the best I can do in this situation?

I would suggest installing the new version of glib under `/usr/local/lib` or `/usr/local/lib64` and then utilizing the `LD_LIBRARY_PATH` environment variable, like you mentioned above.

In fact that appears to be the default location. From the output of `./configure --help` in glib-2.33.8:


By default, `make install' will install all the files in
`/usr/local/bin', `/usr/local/lib' etc. You can specify
an installation prefix other than `/usr/local' using `--prefix',
for instance `--prefix=$HOME'.


See this Ubuntu Forum thread for more details.