MacPorts 2.3.2 and "port provides"

[Jan Stary]

On Mar 05 09:17:22, allbery.b at gmail.com wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 5, 2015 at 9:13 AM, Jan Stary <hans at stare.cz> wrote:
> 
> > > Those aren't hardlinks, but /tmp is a symlink to /private/tmp. Your
> > > vim just happens to realpath(3) before saving, it seems.
> >
> > It's not a symlink, they have the same inode number.
> > A symlink would look like this:
> >
> 
> Your observation would be valid if the file /tmp/whatever were symlinked.
> But it's not that specific file, but the directory /tmp that is symlinked.

Right. Thanks.
Anyway, does anyone know why this even exists?