My experience has been that, for sane libraries, the configuration process supports installing to an arbitrary prefix. In general, I end up making a new prefix

My experience has been that, for sane libraries, the configuration process supports installing to an arbitrary prefix. In general, I end up making a new prefix for every project. And if doing this turns into dependecy hell, shouldn't that make you think twice about your dependencies? Worst case, you find out you need a different libc, and then you start questioning your life decisions.