I learned about this one the hard way when I went to update a really crufty (~ 1 year since last update) Arch system I use infrequently the other day. I had failed to update my libarchive version prior to the change and the package manager could not process the new format.
Luckily updating libarchive manually with an intermediate version resolved my issue and everything proceeded fine.
This is a good change, but it's a reminder to pay attention to the Arch Linux news feed, because every now and then something important will change. The maintainers provided ample warning about this change there (and indeed I had updated by other systems in response) so we procrastinators really had no excuse :)
Luckily updating libarchive manually with an intermediate version resolved my issue and everything proceeded fine.
This is a good change, but it's a reminder to pay attention to the Arch Linux news feed, because every now and then something important will change. The maintainers provided ample warning about this change there (and indeed I had updated by other systems in response) so we procrastinators really had no excuse :)