Herr Preusse,
I believe you are correct, and I also believe there should be a more current Debian package in non-stable than the existing 8.4.2, which is starting to grow old very ungracefully. This problem has been addressed by Ubuntu developers, at least. There is a Virtual Test PPA based on an Oneiric bug report, and they have a set of binaries built on the 05.27.2011 branch of the Open VM Tools project on SourceForge. DKMS now actually builds VMware kernel modules on everything up to, and including, the latest 3.0.0 release candidates. You may recall Debian yanked the DKMS package from their repositories because, in the 'stable' code base, 8.4.2-261024, it's still broken. I've heard Debian is monitoring the Oneiric bug report very closely. Let us hope so.
