Ehm... I'm not a vim user, so I don't know exactly what ts=2 sw=2 noet means, but...
personally I never use tabs because of thouse indenting issues, so I want to ask [silly] question: why to use tabs at all? why not to indent with space chars only? Here is my take, and this is where you have ridiculous no-win debates on the subject. Tabs should be used for structuring your syntax, such as in loops and conditional statements. If you use spaces only, you are making everyone that reads your code abide by your particular
This means that tabstops (ts) are set to equal the width of 2 spaces, and shiftwidth (sw) is also set to 2 spaces. It is a bit harder to explain the difference between these two things, but for most purposes you set them to the same value. The 'no expand tab' (noet) setting keeps tabs as tabs and does not convert them to spaces. preference (2 spaces, 4, 8, etc). With tabs anyone is free to change the default (which is also an assumption made by spaces that a tab is always x characters). To sum up my position, and at least what seems to be the position of the current pacman codebase with already existing modelines: tabs are used for indenting, spaces are used for spacing. -Dan