In my own developer package repository, and in merge requests I have made recently to official Exherbo repositories, I have started to include Manifest files alongside the Exheres packaging. This post is an attempt to document how I have the tooling set up for semi-automatically generating manifests.
The cave tool includes a cave digest subcommand which inherits the manifest generation code which had originally been developed for Gentoo. It can be used with Exherbo, but it requires some custom configuration in order to fit with the recommended Exherbo contribution workflow. The two main key points are that the Manifest files need to be generated in the development checkout of the repository (which will usually be in your home directory) instead of the system checkout (under /var/db/paludis), and you will need to override some of the digest generation settings since these aren’t configured in most Exherbo repositories.