Given what we've learnt in the last 24hrs about xz utilities, you could forgive a paranoid person for seriously considering getting rid entirely of them from their systems, especially since there are suitable alternatives available. Some might say that's a bit extreme, xz-utils will get a thorough audit and it will all be fine. But when a malicious actor has been a key maintainer of something as complex as a decompression utility for years, I'm not sure I could ever trust that codebase again. Maybe a complete rewrite will emerge, but I'm personally unwilling to continue using xz utils in the meantime for uncompressing anything on my systems, even if it is done by an unprivileged process.
I see that many system package ebuilds unconditionally expect app-arch/xz-utils to be installed simply to be able to decompress the source archive in SRC_URI. So simply specifying -lzma on your system isn't going to get rid of it. No one could have been expected to foresee what's happened with xz-utils, but now that it's here, perhaps Gentoo (and other projects that do) should consider not relying on a single decompression algorithm for source archives, even just as an insurance against some other yet unknown disaster with one algorithm or another in future? And yes I'm sure there will be individual packages that currently absolutely need xz-utils installed during the build process, and one or two that absolutely have to have it available at runtime, but those bridges can be crossed as and when. Eddie
