anonftp-3.2-alt1

First, /srv/ftp/ is more compliant with FHS, which in its turn provides a justification for having a common directory for the served data -- http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html#SRVDATAFORSERVICESPROVIDEDBYSYSTEM .


For one thing, using /srv/--a single parent directory to keep the data of one type--would make possible a gross simple configuration of the corresponding mountpoint; the configuration of the /var/ftp/ mountpoint is something discussed in https://bugzilla.altlinux.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9402#c6 , but a distinguished configuration for ftp could be a too fine-grained, inconvenient thing in many cases, as opposed to selecting a storage for all the served data (+ www, etc.) at once.

I have looked a little at Google search results, and they show that some other distros use /srv/ftp/ by default, e.g.:

http://en.opensuse.org/FTP_Server_HOWTO#Quick_Setup
https://help.ubuntu.com/9.04/serverguide/C/ftp-server.html#vsftpd-anonymous-configuration

and some don't want to make the transition:

http://bugs.gentoo.org/78934