On a fresh install of Fedora Core, the file /etc/ld.so.conf lists /usr/lib/sane as one of the search directories for shared libraries This is wrong, the /usr/lib/sane directory contains only SANE backends, not ordinary libraries. SANE's dll backend is capable of determining for itself the location of these shared objects, which could be thought of in this context as "plug-ins" akin to the XMMS plug-ins, and many others which of course are not listed in /etc/ld.so.conf If this package (sane-backends) changes /etc/ld.so.conf then it should be patched not to do so. If instead the change is a patch in Fedora's glibc (the package which owns /etc/ld.so.conf itself) then please re-assign this bug to the appropriate maintainer.
It is added (by the sane-backends package) in order for the dlopen to work. The files that are dlopen'd are the *.so.1 symlinks, which are put in place by ldconfig.
Surely the correct incantation in that case is ldconfig -n /usr/lib/sane ... rather than altering the system library config?
Hmm, good point. Try 1.0.12-6.