Isn't this just srcpac?

Hmmm, i think this is an interesting idea. Currently the "reason" flag is either "explicit" or "implicit". Adjusting this to include some indication of "built from source" would be easy. That is not to say that pacman need do anything about it, really, but just record the reason, and allow some way to list packages by reason.

However, the only piece I see missing is _how_ to determine if a package is custom built. For instance, what's the different between a -A operation on an official package, and one you built?

I think original request can be mostly solved by adding option to makeworld to build only packages installed from some repos (user can specify his local self-made repo) and another for building only packages that were installed with -A (which is mostly the case of self-made packages only).

For the record though, codemac is right... srcpac has an option somewhere to rebuild all packages that srcpac itself has built...

So, this can be closed, I suppose?

The reason I proposed this back then is that, taking any package, there is no way to know if it has been built on the local machine or not, unless you always used srcpac. Personally I prefer the (standard) makeworld way, that lets me rebuild entire blocks of software, I don't know if it's the same to others.

Anyway, I thought of several ways to implement this, and everyone of them has its drawbacks.
- We could simply set a flag for "unofficial distribution". It's easily fakeable, but is it a problem? For me it's not. After all, all package metadata are fakeable. This is the concern for the majority of methods I'm proposing.
- Otherwise, we could rely on the Packager field, set in makepkg.conf. This is easy and there would be no problems to patch makeworld to check for that, too.
- We could add some kind of unique system id (like in archstats) to every package built, while every package uploaded to the official repos would have a custom id. Nice, but difficult to implement (after all, every dev builds on his own machine... they should have a different makepkg to handle this).
- Signing packages, like in debian. This has been discussed for pacman 3, not sure if it's been implemented... Anyway, this is the only one that solves the faking problem.

Notice that all my solutions move the spotlight on the package, not on the program that manages it. I don't think that adding one more location to store metadata is KISS, so all metadata should be unified inside the package.

IMO none of above ways to implement this are KISS.

Why not just create local repo for all packages built from source and run makeworld on that repo?
Small changes to makeworld for support of custom ABS tree are needed for this.

A local repo is probably the "proper" way to do this. But also, srcpac would work too.

I'm going to close this