I've got this nice patch from Akshay Joshi that removes almost all of the checkpatch.pl warnings from drm/i915. If I don't merge it now, it's going to go stale and be useless; if I merge it only to drm-intel-next, it will be the source of endless conflicts.
However, it's a huge patch (yes, the code was rather sloppy), and doesn't exactly fit into the "critical patches only please" mode of the current stage of 3.1 development.
I've checked the patch very carefully, using the obvious git diff -b to make sure it really doesn't touch anything but whitespace, but also using objdump -s to compare the output of the compiler. There were no differences found with git-diff -b. The only differences found by objdump are two whitespace changes in some debug output messages in intel_bios.c.
I think I have three choices:
1) merge the patch and expect complaints from upstream
2) thank Akshay for his good intentions, discard the patch and hope that he feels motivated enough to do it all over again in time for the 3.2 merge window.
3) thank Akshay for his good intentions and leave the code as-is, forever to ease back-porting of fixes to older kernel versions.
Frankly, if we're ever going to merge whitespace fixups, this would be a pretty darn good time; drm-intel-fixes and drm-intel-next are in-sync as I haven't started pulling 3.2 code into -next.