Dear Arghya,
I leave the more technical questions to Marcus; here are some of the
more general ones.
> But I'm not really sure what these distfiles are? Could someone elaborate
> on how distfiles are useful in a macports installation and when are they used?
Distfiles are package sources stored inside
/opt/local/var/macports/distfiles
and mirrored at
http://distfiles.macports.org
They are extracted before the build begins.
> Is there anything specific that distinguishes build dependencies from others?
The only difference is that the build dependency is only needed when
building the package (one such example would be CMake or compiler),
while regular dependencies are nearly always needed for the port to
work correctly (python module cannot work when python is not
installed).
MacPorts may delete a build dependency without breaking port, but it
may note delete runtime dependencies (dependes_lib, depends_run).
Mojca
