How do I upgrade the whole system?

Hi,
I tried to upgrade some existing .deb packages (cairo) using the latest tarball (version 1.4.10 and using the --enable-glitz option).

The usual compilation steps...
 $ ./configure --enable-glitz
 $ make
   worked like charm (as they say).

Then I removed libcairo2, libcairo2-dev and libcairo2-doc from my system (Gutsy 7.10):
 $ sudo dpkg --force-depends -r libcairo2 libcairo2-dev libcairo2-doc
    half the system didn't work as anything from (g)vim to synaptic needs those libraries...

I played it nice using checkinstall:
 $ sudo checkinstall
    synaptic (and other things) started working again but it informed me that there were 186 broken packages dependencies.

So I played nicer:
$ sudo checkinstall --review-control
    modifying the deb rules file before the package was built, adding 2 "Provides:" lines with libcairo2 and libcairo2-dev values, still having 186 broken packages dependencies.

Meanwhile, I discovered (thanks to synaptic) that the original libcairo2 and libcairo2-dev provided libcairo and libcairo-dev, respectively, so I repeated the above command using 2 "Provides:" lines with libcairo and libcairo-dev values instead, leaving me again with the same 186 broken packages dependencies.

Adding "Replaces:" or "Conflicts:" to the deb rules doesn't help as this should be a reciprocal agreement between mutual excluding packages.

The question is: how do I upgrade a package to a more recent/optimized/customized version using a tarball, being able to use the package manager to remove/upgrade it later and not leaving the whole system unmanageble for the rest of its days?

Thanks for your answers,
 Nic