The first member is named debian-split and contains a series of lines, separated by newlines. Currently eight lines are present:
Programs which read multi-part archives should be prepared for the minor format version number to be increased and additional lines to be present, and should ignore these if this is the case.
If the major format version number has changed, an incompatible change has been made and the program should stop. If it has not, then the program should be able to safely continue, unless it encounters an unexpected member in the archive (except at the end), as described below.
The second, last required member is named data.N, where N denotes the part number. It contains the raw part data.
These members must occur in this exact order. Current implementations should ignore any additional members after data.N. Further members may be defined in the future, and (if possible) will be placed after these two.