It wouldn't be a Weekly Edition without a flame war over style

yes - and in arch/x86 (where this discussion originated from) we do not actually reject
patches based on style issues - we either fix it ourselves if it's easy, or we ask people to
fix them up and if they refuse it we still do it ourselves.

So far out of the more than hundred arch/x86 contributors in v2.6.25 (who authored over 1200
arch/x86 changes since v2.6.24) it happened only once that a cleanup request from us x86
maintainers was refused. In that case we simply cleaned up the patches ourselves. There's not
a single arch/x86 patch that has been submitted to lkml that is not in x86.git right now which
has been rejected for pure style issues.

People actually like consistent code, they like if code "looks nice" throughout a subsystem,
and they like the increased maintainability and lower bug rate this brings.

It just needs maintainers and tools reminding people of that in a neutral, objective,
non-intrusive and non-workflow-impacting but still persistent manner. It's easy to get
non-functional components of source code wrong, it happens to oldtimers just as much as
newbies.

This discussion IMHO is more about those maintainers who have a gut reaction against like the
bad news that a "scripts/checkpatch.pl --file */*.c" run brings when they run it over their
own files. As someone who has fixed literally thousands of style issues i certainly know that
"oh no!" feeling! :-)