It's more than that.

I've had a patch rejected because my unit tests used the wrong verification manner (java assertTrue() instead of assertThat() in cases where the latter would report better error messages were the test to fail, as I recall). Automatic blah will never catch this kind of thing.

Ditto for human-readable messages that have/lack full stops at the end.

Ditto for if() foo vs if() { foo } and the ever-lovely style question, are abbreviations such as TCP to be called TCP or Tcp in camelcased identifiers?

Style is largely a human matter.

> Ditto for if() foo vs if() { foo }

At least that one can be fixed automatically by eclipse.

But sure, there are some things that are difficult to automate. What I'm saying that one should not hassle a contributor over all those things that that can be done by machines.

How is that "hassle"? Somebody needs to fix it, why should it be the maintainer?

In my experience, not even bothering with style is a good indicator of careless "shotgun coding" and such PRs typically have far worse issues. It's also typical that such PRs won't have real issues fixed either.

> why should it be the maintainer?

I'm saying: Why should it be either human?

> In my experience, [...]

That seems fairly dismissive to me. An expert in a certain area can certainly fix smaller issues with a few lines of code but only have a limited amount of time on their hands. Having to read a lengthy style guide and making sure they adhere to every single rule, especially when those rules are the opposite of their regular habits, is a non-zero hurdle to contributing.

Offloading that work to a machine as far as possible lowers the burden to only those rules that cannot be applied automatically.

Well, you can't do that when reading code on github.com, for example.

Even if I have the code checked out, I don't want to clutter my diff with hundreds of reformatted lines just to read it.

It sounds like formatting isn't important for your code comprehension. That's nice for you, but for many of us, that's just not how our brains work.

But if you just shift the burden from yourself to someone else that's a zero-sum game, not an improvement.

Instead a formatter should be applied via a commit hook and github should provide a what-if version of the pull request with the hooks applied.