dropping libc 2.1 into stable for some development work possible?

[Britton <fsblk@aurora.uaf.edu>]

I have been told that I probably need the features of glibc 2.1 for some
of the development I am doing, however, I don't want to risk an upgrade to
unstable at the moment.  

Is it possible to get the upstream library, install it in /usr/local, and
then compile certain packages against it (static or whatever is fine for
the moment) without disturbing the rest of the system?  Will I see full
benefits of newer conformance symbols and everything?

How much work am I looking at to do this?  I have never done it before and
if it's going to be really confusing or require knowledge of many strange
compilation options or both I will probably just brave unstable.

Thanks for any advice you can offer me.

Britton Kerin
__
GNU GPL: "The Source will be with you... always."