macports stages - how to stop server processes?

[Jordan K. Hubbard]

On Oct 21, 2008, at 12:36 AM, Ryan Schmidt wrote:

> One often has the need to load and unload services at times other  
> than activating and deactivating a port. For example, ports are not  
> loaded when they are initially installed, because some initial setup  
> might need to be done manually by the user first. Then the user will  
> want to load the port. Or if the user just wants to restart a  
> service, they will unload and then load it again.

Hmmm.  OK, I can sort of buy that, but if the intention was to expose  
the de-facto standard service / apachectl / launchctl / pcastctl  
semantics in some port-generic way, then why wasn't this done as  
start, stop and restart (as an alias for stop/start)?  That would  
certainly make more sense to me.

- Jordan