That's too bad. I've only just tried it myself, the other day, on a Linux box, after it wouldn't work here. I did some research and wanted it for large, similar disk images I'd like to squish down. lrztar -U
seems perfect for this. They are in a zfs with compression, yielding 15-20% savings on a dozen or so images, but I think lrzip could improve this to 80%, and likely higher because half of the images are nearly identical. I'm surprised more folks aren't using it.
It does seem to throw that same error regardless of how it's installed. :x