Daniel Veillard wrote:

xz package dependancy is IMHO a small price to pay: Size: 443012 to garantee reliability

Do you know lzip (http://www.nongnu.org/lzip/lzip.html)? Lzip package size is only 55156 bytes, it is stable (xz is beta), some people consider it better designed than xz (http://lpar.ath0.com/2009/09/25/documentation-as-an-indicator-of-code-qualit...) and may very well be the LZMA file format that succeeds. Best regards, Antonio.