Xz is the successor to the lempel-ziv/markov-chain algorithm compression format, which provides memory-hungry but powerful compression (often better than bzip2) and fast, easy decompression.

this package provides symbolic links allowing xz-utils to provide the same interface for manipulating lzma files as the lzma package. the xz-utils package can handle lzma files on its own; this package is only necessary when using scripts or other programs that require the older command names.