Hi Luca,
It's needed for checkpatch compliance.
I'm trying to understand the problems involved, but looking at this again, it is not clear to me what you say here. When I run your version 1 of the patches (where you only do the rename) through checkpatch, I get:
WARNING: line over 80 characters #116: FILE: net/tftp.c:59: +static int TftpRemotePort; /* The UDP port at their end */
WARNING: consider using kstrto* in preference to simple_strtol #215: FILE: net/tftp.c:619:
TftpRemotePort = simple_strtol(ep, NULL, 10);total: 0 errors, 2 warnings, 99 lines checked
/home/dzu/transfer/p2 has style problems, please review. If any of these errors are false positives report them to the maintainer, see CHECKPATCH in MAINTAINERS.
So I'm not sure why you say that the other changes are needed for checkpatch. What exactly do you mean by this?
All the comments were nicely columned before my patchset. Reducing the length of a line would have broken this.
I chose to change all of them in order to preserve the pre-existing coding style.
Ok, this makes sense, alas the wording "it's needed for checkpatch compliance" was somewhat misleading.
Ideally only the relevant changes should be in one commit and re-indentation to align everything again should be in a separate commit. As we saw that checkpatch also looks at context lines, this commit usually needs to be logically _before_ your own changes. Probably the easiest way to achieve this is to commit the changes separately and reorder them with git rebase -i.
I amended the wiki page[1] in the hope of getting more light into these things.
Cheers Detlev
[1] http://www.denx.de/wiki/U-Boot/Patches