You are conflating development with distribution of binaries (a problem which interpreted languages do not have, I hasten to add).

1. The accepted solution to what you're describing in terms of development, is passing appropriate flags to `./configure`, specifying the path for the alternative versions of the libraries you want to use. This is as simple as it gets.

As for where to get these libraries from in the event that the distro doesn't provide the right version, `./configure` is basically a script. Nothing stopping you from printing a couple of ftp mirrors in the output to be used as a target to wget.

2. As for the problem of distribution of binaries and related up-to-date libraries, the appropriate solution is a distro package manager. A c package manager wouldn't come into this equation at all, unless you wanted to compile from scratch to account for your specific circumstances, in which case, goto 1.