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, taring 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?