According to the FHS, /srv is for "site-specific" data served by the host: http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html#SRVDATAFORSERVICESPROVIDEDBYSYSTEM IMHO, this means webapps. The FHS makes specific mention that a distribution must take care not to touch user files in this directory, which infers that it is acceptable (expected?) that distributions will put files here. I also strongly agree that user modifyable files (eg, configuration files) must not be put anywhere in /usr and splitting the configuration into /etc like non-webapps is just a security nightmare. We also want to avoid untrusted processes like apache/lighttpd having read/write access into /usr where ever possible. Referring to the FHS again: "*/usr** is shareable, read-only data. That means that /usr should be shareable between various FHS-compliant hosts and must not be written to. Any information that is host-specific or varies with time is stored elsewhere.*" Keywords: "read-only", "must not be written to" and "host-specific"
