Is Chimera a fork?
No, it’s an independent project not directly derived from anything else.
What is the distro’s relation to Void Linux?
If Chimera build templates and process seem suspciously similar to Void
Linux’s xbps-src, cbuild originally started as a rewrite of xbps-src
to attempt to eliminate its various issues, and the main developer/founder
of Chimera also worked on Void Linux. However, no actual code is shared
with xbps-src.
Is Chimera an Alpine derivative?
Besides using the same user-side package manager (apk-tools), Chimera is
unrelated to Alpine. The version of apk-tools it uses is also different,
and the source packaging system as well as all actual packaging are written
from scratch.
What about ChimeraOS?
The system also has no relation to ChimeraOS, besides the unfortunate name similarity. ChimeraOS used to be called GamerOS and renamed itself to ChimeraOS later; however, at this point Chimera Linux was already in public development with its name in place.
Why Python for the source packaging?
Python was chosen as it’s more or less the standard scripting language on
Unix-like systems nowadays and is robust and portable. The cbuild system
does not rely on any modules outside of Python’s standard library. The
Python syntax is also flexible and adjustable enough to make for a nice
syntax for templates without having to invent yet another DSL that would
introduce its own bugs and need its own parsing.