Red Hat Enterprise Linux also includes a wide range of libraries whose APIs and ABIs are not guaranteed to be preserved between major releases. Compatibility of these libraries is, however, provided within a major release of the distribution. Applications are free to use these non­core libraries, but to ensure compatibility across major releases, application vendors should provide their own copies of these non­core libraries, which in turn should depend only on the core libraries listed in the previous section.

Each package is annotated with a compatibility number for API and ABI. The API numbers correspond to characterizations described in Section 4.2.1, “API Compatibility”. The ABI numbers correspond to characterizations described in Section 4.2.2, “ABI Compatibility”.