Marc Brockschmidt posted an update about the next Debian version on the Debian mailinglist.

Since our last release update, there were a few changes we want to inform you about - actually quite many and we should have written earlier, but writing an update also takes time.

Please note that as of now, RC bugs and problematic transitions are our main concern. There has been progress, but we still need to lower the number of release critical bugs further. There will be a couple of Bug Squashing Parties soon, so please consider to join one or more of them.

We want to ask you to not do disturbing updates of your packages in unstable without contacting the release team before. If you need a staging area or simply want to use Debian infrastructure to show newer packages, you can always upload to experimental, which is nowadays mostly autobuilt.

Etch will carry 4.0 as version number.

Update on Debian Etch