Hacking on ROS packages that are dependencies of other packages
I've found some bugs in the gazebo package for Groovy and would like to fix them. Currently, gazebo is installed via the ros-groovy-simulator-gazebo Debian package. My question is, what's the best practice for setting up a development environment to hack on Gazebo?
The problem is that Gazebo is a dependency of dozens (hundreds?) of other ROS packages, so I can't simply uninstall it and compile it from source. Should I use equivs to create a dummy package for Gazebo, and then compile it from source, or is it possible to have side-by-side installations of the source and packaged versions?