I'm just going to point out that all of the base/ files I've looked at have the following at the top of the file:

# et:ts=4

What that does is, in vim, sets 4-width soft tabs. Sounds like whomever created these files in the first place intended for it to be that way ;)

-- 
Kevin Ballard
http://kevin.sb.org
kevin@sb.org
http://www.tildesoft.com