This is part of a general effort to move all of Terraform's non-library
package surface under internal in order to reinforce that these are for
internal use within Terraform only.
If you were previously importing packages under this prefix into an
external codebase, you could pin to an earlier release tag as an interim
solution until you've make a plan to achieve the same functionality some
other way.
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