Many times these tweaks are temporary and, indeed, newer versions make them unnecessary. It can definitely be done as you suggest, but I think it'd be in the spirit of the help provided by, e.g., .pacsave and .pacnew files, to have pacman issue a warning. --
Pacman doesn't really have a way of looking at an installed package and knowing that it's been modified from the default repo package (as far as I know ...). Absent a new patch to add such functionality, Karol's suggestion of IgnorePkg is the best idea and also provides the warning you seek when performing a full update, in the form of warning: package_foo: ignoring package upgrade (1.0.0-1 => 1.1.0-1) This warning lets you know that something you're ignoring has been updated, and you should take steps based on the reason you ignored it; IgnorePkg does not interfere with a 'pacman -U' operation, and if specifically told to install an ignored package from repos via 'pacman -S package_foo' will ask for confirmation. --ZekeS