VIM and tab to space migration

[Brian Quinlan]

Right now I'm working in an environment where tabs were mandated as the 
indentation style for Python. I've managed to persuade everyone to 
switch to 4 space indentation.

The problem is that we now have a migration problem. Most of our 
develoeprs are using VIM which, AFAIK, is not intelligent enough to 
detect the current indentation style of a file. Modifying all of our 
source files at once to use spaces and then getting everyone to change 
their .vimrc is a posibility but not desirable because everyone would 
have to check in their work (whatever it's state) at the time of 
migration. Does anyone have any suggestions? Ideally, there would be 
some way to tell VIM to use the file's exsiting indentation style. That 
way I could slowly switch to spaces over time.

Cheers,
Brian