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by jessaustin 3842 days ago
tar can link the xz lib without forking.
1 comments

So tar does "implement decompression" (and compression, by delegating the work to libarchive) and it can work even "if you don't have xz installed".
It would require liblzma, but you are correct that the library is a separate thing from the executable xz.
> It would require liblzma

Yep, in the same way it requires libz and libbz2.