This new format introduces:
* A new container format which stores metadata in a way that is more efficient for compression, decompression, and size. Creation time can be 2x faster, apply time can be a few seconds faster, size savings can be 500 KB - couple of MB due to metadata alone.
* An array of supported compression formats including lzma, bzip2, zlib and more. We now default to lzma which is as competitive as bzip2 (which we were using in version 2 format) in applying/creation times, but can save several MB on size.
* Tracking of files from an old app being replicated in different locations in the new app. This can track unchanged files being renamed and can result in significant savings if the files are large.
Version 2 format is still the default. To use version 3, pass --version=3 to BinaryDelta when creating a patch. We will switch the default to version 3 later. generate_appcast support is upcoming.
Zorg