Cph is an abstraction of conda package handling and a tool for extracting, creating, and converting between formats.

At the time of writing, the standard conda package format is a .tar.bz2 file. That will need to be maintained for quite a long time, thanks to the long tail of people using old conda versions. There is a new conda format, described at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1HGKsbg_j69rKXP- ihhpCb1kNQSE8Iy3yOsUU2x68x8uw/edit?usp=sharing. This new format is designed to have much faster metadata access and utilize more modern compression algorithms, while also facilitating package signing without adding sidecar files.