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.
The types in this package are intended to replace plan- and diff-related
types from the "terraform" package, although those older types must remain
for now so that they can be used to implement shims for older codepaths.
type "Changes" is approximately equivalent to terraform.Diff, but renamed
since it now describes whole objects before and after rather than an
attribute-level diff as before. The term "diff" is now reserved for the
visual rendition of the changes we'll display to the user, although
rendering of this new Changes model is not yet implemented.
Martin Atkins