i found it be a useful policy, much like 100% test coverage, actually.  it helps to avoid many style discussions by providing some common ground, and except for very few people everybody seems to be willing to compromise and stick to these conventions.  that alone is a big win, imho.  but i probably "sound" like i'm arguing to put that policy in place for pyramid again — which i'm not.  i'd like to see it, but i'm not particularly eager about it...

that being said, i've played a bit with [autopep8](https://pypi.python.org/pypi/autopep8) at the sprint.  turns out it can automatically fix almost all of the 5000+ pep8 issues in the current pyramid source (ignoring E501, i.e. long lines).  only 5 or 6 remain after running `autopep8 --verbose --in-place --recursive --aggressive --ignore=E501 pyramid/`, and those are easily fixed (use of `isinstance()` and `.has_key()`).

the resulting changes are actually pretty straight-forward and non-invasive, but the good news is actually, that it can be automated.  that way the changes could also be applied to currently open branches/pull requests in order to avoid merge conflicts.  or iow, if we decided to go for pep8 compliance at any point in time, it would be pretty easy to get... :)