As of today, the most common implementation of the LZMA algorithm on open source operating systems is the xz format. However, there are a few others available. Notably, a few packages found in the Gentoo repository use the superior lzip format. Does this mean you may end up having to have separate decompressors for both formats installed? Not necessarily.
Back in 2017, I’ve entertained a curious idea. Since both lzip and xz are both container formats built on top of the original LZMA algorithm, and xz features backwards-compatible support for the earlier container format used by lzma-utils, how hard would it be to implement a decoder for the lzip format as well? Not very hard, it turned out. After all, most of the code was already there — I’ve just had to implement the additional container format. With some kind help of XZ upstream, I’ve done that.
Sadly, the patches have not been merged yet. More than three years have passed now in waiting. Today I’ve rebased them and updated to follow changes in XZ itself. For anyone interested, it can be found on the lzip2 branch of my xz fork. After building xz with my patches, it now happily decompresses .lz files in addition to the regular set. Thanks to a tiny patchset you don’t have to build yet another program to unpack a few distfiles.