Are you sure it isn't your Fedora installation that has the problem?  My
understanding is that the linker name (the libxxx.so name) should exist
and be a symbolic link to the most recent soname (libxxx.N).  So I think
distutils is doing the right thing.

See for example
http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Program-Library-HOWTO/shared-libraries.html, the
first section of which (I didn't read the whole thing) matches my
understanding of how this works.

Do you have any doc pointers that says Fedora doesn't work this way?

(Note that the libxxx.so linker name may not be in the same directory as
the sonames or the actual library files.)