I am very surprised that during make in the subdirectory libxslt make fails
if library liblzma is not already installed.

Is this because I had xz installed when I build libxml2 a long time ago? In
any case, I have not been able to determine why it is needed - if if it is
needed - why did configure not catch this?

Thanks,
Michael

p.s. installing xz 'cured' the make.