CyanogenMod 10 will only arrive after stable CM 9 is ready, says team

Ever since Google showed off Jelly Bean and handed out Nexus devices to developers at this year's Google I/O, one question that’s on everyone’s mind is when we can expect a CyanogenMod (CM) custom ROM of Jelly Bean? Given the fact that there isn’t a stable CM9 ROM yet, how much longer would we have to wait before we got some early builds of Jelly Bean? The team posted an update on Google+ that outlines the progress of the build and when can we expect it. In a nutshell, they’ll begin work on CM10, once they are able to release a stable build of CM9. They also mentioned that they do not have their hands on the source code yet, as Google will be announcing that somewhere in the middle of this month. They’ve also clarified that the next version of CyanogenMod will be CM10 since it aligns with the same naming scheme that they’ve followed for past releases. For example, “G” (Gingerbread) is the seventh letter and hence it was CM7, whereas “I” is the ninth letter, hence it’s CM9.

Coming soon...

The team has also confirmed that porting ‘Project Butter’ over to other devices shouldn’t be much of an issue. While there might be some breakage in existing libs, there’s nothing that a small hack won’t fix. Also, building a CM10 ROM shouldn’t take as long as CM9, since Jelly Bean is just a tweaked version of Ice Cream Sandwich. One of the reasons, why it’s taking this long to build a stable CM9 ROM is that they started from scratch with CM9. Since ICS was a major overhaul over Gingerbread, the team decided to rewrite all the enhancements from the ground up. This prolonged the development cycle, but the end result was worth the wait. For CM10, they just have to incorporate the new code into CM9, which should be a painless process.

A few things that need a bit of work are the LockScreen enhancements as well as the Theme Engine. They will also have to hand-merge the updated Framework code mostly because the new code has been split into multiple projects to better the Platform Development Kit.
Here’s a very interesting video with the whole CyanogenMod team at an Android User Group Meetup in San Francisco.