> /var/run otoh is only available very late at boot, since /var might reside on a separate file system
he forgot to mention that this is a non-standard, specialized setup. In normal case, /var is on the root partition.
Specialized it may be, but nonstandard it is not; the entire reason for /var to exist as a separate directory is so that it can be mounted from a local disk in cases where your root partition and /usr are NFS-mounted or otherwise read-only or shared between multiple machines.
It seems to me that moving /var/run to /run simplifies the filesystem "hierary" rather than making it more complex.
In 1997, I was working at TCSI. My SPARC 5 workstation had a small local disk, which had crucial things like vi on it, which were fast to access. It might have been 500 megabytes or less. /usr was NFS-mounted over an unswitched 10-megabit Ethernet to a gigantic 35-gigabyte NFS server, from which I had access to a huge variety of software, including something like 8 versions of the CenterLine C++ compiler, much more than would fit on my local machine, but which was much slower to access. My home directory was also NFS-mounted.
Installing the huge variety of software on everybody's workstation would have meant that we had to have dozens of copies of it, using up precious disk space, and furthermore that installing or updating software would need to be done on every single workstation, instead of just on the NFS server. rdist existed but wasn't widely used; rsync had just been invented.
Also, "packages and versions"? pkg_add isn't what you think of as a package management system. The FHS was adapted from Unix workstation practice established before Debian invented package management as we know it today, and at a time that Slackware still didn't have package management. You could install your packages wherever you wanted, much as people do today with easy_install or gems.
It was a good idea back in the SunOS days (and it's probably still workable to a limited extent for the BSDs, and perhaps folks like Gentoo) when local storage wasn't as plentiful as it is today, but I think we've safely moved on at this point.
The failure mode of not separating out /var from the rest of the system is interesting; spool, cache, lib, and log can be particularly problematic, depending on the purpose of your system.
Not separating filesystems for hobby systems and home computing is perfectly reasonable in the name of simplicity, but there's a reason longbeards like me prefer to do things this way.
(Sadly, I was cursed with fair, slow-growing hair, so I have never quite reached my bearded potential. My poor attitude about your new-fangled gadgets will have to suffice.)
Thanks for all your responses :-)
I guess I have been hanging out in BSD land and haven't setup a Linux system. Is this correct? I generally have /var separate from / (along with /usr, /tmp, /home). How does the average HNer setup their Linux partitions?