Why a new package format?

We already have the deb and rpm formats which work fine and are well supported. So why a new format?

supporting two formats is troublesome for vendors
both formats lack a couple of desirable features:
internationalization support
multiple architecture and OS support
multiple payloads

In order to resolve these issues we decided that it was desirable to design a new format that will hopefully replace deb and rpm and become the new standard packaging format.