MacPorts duplicate files or hardlinks?

[Bee]

MacPorts 1.7 selfupdate (recently)
MacOS 10.4.11

MacPorts seems to keep many duplicate files.

As an example, I did a search for duplicates I found these identical  
files:

/opt/local/bin/vim
/opt/local/var/macports/software/vim/7.2.182_0/opt/local/bin/vim

Are these really a duplicate files or a hardlink?
I think the "2" before the "root" means it has a hardlink. Is that  
correct?

-rwxr-xr-x   2 root  admin  - 1462888 May 17 22:26 vim

If duplicate files:
+ Is there a reason both are kept?
+ Is there a way to "clean" duplicates?

--
Bill Muench
Santa Cruz, California