You are wrong, on both individual level and stereotyping to a nation of people.
On the individual level, he did do the debugging and analysis, on a smaller scope. Linus was asking a bigger scope analysis and a lot of work. Some people are willing to spend time to understand and fix problem for free. Some people have better things to do and aren't willing to spend the time to do it. That's their prerogative.
On a nation level, there are Chinese who want to get things done and there are Chinese who want to understand the root causes, just as there are people in other nations/cultures who want to get things done and there are people who want to understand the root causes.
It's not an acceptable approach in kernel development.
A patch like that has zero (actually, negative) value. It simply shouldn't be accepted and regressing to the last "working", most tested version should be the option.
So, all in all, if you are not willing to do your homework well enough, it's better for everybody if you don't bother at all. It wastes both your time and the maintainers' time. Linus' time no less.
Thanks for the explanation on the individual level. Sounds reasonable.
On your second point, yes, you can say of any cultural group that there are people who do X and people who do non-X, but that doesn't proves that there are no global traits and that all cultural stereotypes exists for no reason.
But I understand your point as "you are wrong to try to attribute the behavior of an individual to a stereotype, since they can only be used at a very broad level", and I think you're probably right.
Not really, as garden path sentences are more about incorrect parsing of structure, rather than interpreting the meaning of the sentence to be something else. For example, reading the first sentence above, you can get all the way to the end without having re-evaluate the sentence from the beginning. It's only when you read the 2nd sentence that you realize that the writer was implying something different than you first thought.
By your logic, U.S. government are a bunch of armed thugs who happen to control some territory. 50% of the U.S. population aren't voting. 50% of the remaining 50% decides the next government. Basically 25% of the population impose their will on the rest of the 75% of people. That's tyranny.
In Civil War era, the Southern States had democratically voted to leave the Union. The North ignored the democratic result and went to war to bring them back, killing half of millions in the process.
The Southern States had voted democratically, with super majority, to keep blacks as slaves. By your logic, that's just a-ok.
If you're trying to make it perfect, you'll waste all of your time in tiny unimportant details (and you won't even manage to make something good). There are a lot of would-be writers with beautifully polished first chapters, and nothing else. Software is the same.
Likewise with making it good -- everything takes longer than estimated, and so life will likely intervene to stop you working before you even have anything working at all.
Lesson: get it working first (however badly), and evolve it from there.
