Yeah that thought occurred to me. The main reason that I shied away from it is to keep hadoop-lzo's dependencies to a minimum, and also the number of compatibility issues that are relevant was small (1 or 2).

On a related note, I notice that elephant-bird-hadoop-compat declares the hadoop-client dependency as default (thus "compile"). It has an effect of actually dragging in a pretty deep transitive dependencies. Is that intended? Wouldn't "provided" be a better idea?