how do others deal with /var during upgrades?

[Robert P. J. Day]

  in a previous post, i mentioned that my favorite way of upgrading to 
newer releases is to do a fresh install around my existing filesystems.
i'll completely re-format and re-install into filesystems like /, /usr,
/tmp and so on (having saved all of /etc off to the side for later.)
and i'll preserve /home, obviously, and just arrange for it to be 
remounted under the newer OS.

  but /var still drives me a bit nuts, since it's an ugly combination of
stuff that you'd normally want to preserve, and stuff you might happily
toss.

  under /var, you'd find things like web and ftp server data that you'd
probably want to carry across to the new install.  on the other hand, 
there's stuff like, perhaps, /var/log or /var/cache or /var/run that
you might not care about.

  i recall this being a long-time issue in the Filesystem Hierarchy
Standard (FHS), with a proposal for a /srv directory structure for things
to be served, like web and ftp data, but nothing ever came of that (i 
still haven't gotten around to reading the final 2.3 release of the FHS).

  what do others do about this?  using the terminology of the FHS, the 
/var directory structure certainly seems like an inconvenient mix of both 
static and dynamic data.  i'm leaning to creating my own /srv directory
and tossing some symlinks to deal with this.  IMHO, /var is still as much 
of a mess as it ever was.

  thoughts?

rday