Most of us have our own little aliases or bash scripts to quickly switch between stack versions/trunk/etc.  Since the "optimal" approach is very dependent on the individual's situation and preferences, we have yet to come up with anything one-size-fits-all.  For example, the script I've attached that I and a few other WGers use is probably not nearly as useful if you're not developing on low-level stacks.

It has a couple hard-coded paths, but they're towards the top of the file.  An example workflow:

dev visualization-1.0 visualization_common                   # set the package path to include the <base>/dev/visualization-1.0 and <base>/dev/visualization_common paths, in addition to my "base" installed stacks
dev -a geometry-1.0                                                         # add the <base>/dev/geometry-1.0 stack to my package path
dev -s                                                                                # save my state, next time I open a shell it will have my current preferences

Again, this is just one way of doing it, though I find it's the best out of all I've tried for my situation (working on ROS core as well as some of the lower-level stacks).  Other people keep fully separate trees for different situations, or separate overlay setup.sh files, or other things I haven't guessed at.

If all you want is boxturtle vs. latest, setting up those aliases or overlays is much easier.

Josh