And what is line 170 in my working copy of MetricsServiceCassandraTest.java? It is a comment that I just added to make more clear the intent of the next couple lines in the test. I hope we keep the checkstyle rules liberal, i.e., not too specific, in order to minimize stuff like this.

While I agree with you on liberal checkstyle, in the past we had so many commits where a diff read like

-   foo
+    foo

or

-   foo 
+   foo

In those lines it is mostly clear that whitespace is the issue but what about

-   blablablablablablablalabballlabla
+-   blablablablablablablalabba1llabla

Is it obvious that the + line does not only have a whitespace change?
I guess in most cases it is not, which makes reviewing a PR much harder
than it is already.

I don't know about Eclipse or Netbeans, but at least IJ has an option to format code
before commit


That could potentially be used to "enforce" the pure code style like whitespaces without
having the developer manually doing that.