The new format is radically different in than the old in physical
structure, but still has the same logical parts: the plan itself, a
snapshot of the input configuration, and a snapshot of the state as it
existed when the plan was created.
Rather than creating plan-specific serializations of state and config, the
new format instead leans on the existing file formats implemented
elsewhere, wrapping the result up in a zip archive with some internal file
naming conventions.
The plan portion of the file is serialized with protobuf, consistent with
our general strategy of replacing all use of encoding/gob with protobuf
moving forward.
Martin Atkins