I don't know if that can be prevented in the long run. But both brscan (for my brother scanner) and iscan (for my epson scanners) have been broken by the change from libsane to libsane1. For iscan I have unpackaged the debian package, changed the dependency it contains from libsane to libsane1 and installed the changed package. But even then my epson scanners no more work leaving me without any scanner => Reporting a bug.
I don't know if that can be prevented in the long run. But both brscan (for my brother scanner) and iscan (for my epson scanners) have been broken by the change from libsane to libsane1. For iscan I have unpackaged the debian package, changed the dependency it contains from libsane to libsane1 and installed the changed package. But even then my epson scanners no more work leaving me without any scanner => Reporting a bug.
ProblemType: Bug 1~experimental1 ubuntu2 041300rc2- lowlatency x86_64
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 17.10
Package: libsane1 1.0.27-
Uname: Linux 4.13.0-
ApportVersion: 2.20.6-0ubuntu4
Architecture: amd64
Date: Sat Jul 29 08:38:15 2017
EcryptfsInUse: Yes
SourcePackage: sane-backends
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)