[asveikau]

I am a former MS employee, I used to read the compatibility patches when I was bored at the office.

Anyway, liblzma does not "need" to outperform any "competition". If someone wants to work on some performance optimization, it's completely fair to fork. Look at how many performance oriented forks there are of libjpeg. The vanilla libjpeg still works.

[Hakkin]

and then that fork becomes more performant or feature rich or secure or (etc), and it becomes preferred over the original code base, and all distributions switch to it, and we're back at square one.

[snnn]

The vanilla python works fine but conda is definitely more popular among data scientists.