It is possible that is going to occur anyway… since new patches going into gerrit are expected to be required to update to the new format and they may conflict with existing patches… I guess that just goes to show its not good to leave patches sitting around too long getting stale in gerrit.
But of course a global change would cause more of that. So, that leads to existing patches should reformat as they are put in and new patches should be written that way from the start, and at some point a global reformat is done when few patches are in flight that haven’t accounted for this.
But then you have to ask… this is very complicated so might be better to just bite the bullet and deal with the stale patches by rebasing them after the format update.