Maybe they’re referring to “where clauses”?

You didn’t get any instructions before hand? Is this in higher education or earlier?

You having regrets depends on your expectations. If you want a very stable system with little maintenance then you’ll be happy. Packages will be older but that’s what makes it easy to keep stable.

I’m not personally a fan of vanilla Debian because the stable versions are a bit too outdated for the things I like to work with. I do use Debian derivatives though the LTS versions.

Yeah I’m equally confused what this is useful for. Seems like it would rely on custom tooling depending on how the cores talk to each other.