Backport of open-vm-tools for 8.04 LTS?

Is there any chance of getting a backported release of open-vm-tools for hardy? I understand that there were stability concerns when 8.04 was first released, but there have been several new release to this package upstream over the last few months.

I currently have several VMs running 7.10 (the fist JEOS release) and it works great: Kernel upgrades just work, there is no need to recompile modules and reboot twice (increasing downtime). When I attempt to upgrade a 7.10 JeOS install to 8.04, I end up installing a bunch of extra stuff that I don't want on each VM: gcc, make, and kernel headers (nearly 75Mb), along with vmware's tools (nearly 300Mb, not including the additional 300Mb of temp space needed to unpack the installer; which also increase the total VM's total foot print even after deleting them, because of the way sparse disks work.) The point is: this ends up being very time consuming and messes up the whole "minimalistic footprint" idea that I thought the whole JeOS idea was meant to provide.

I see that the open-vm-tools have been made available again for newer releases 8.10 (and pre-release for 9.04), but I don't want to upgrade to a non-LTS platform at this point. We would like to have our VM servers be able to run on a LTS version so that we can keep them on a supported platform for longer with less maintenance. But right now the choice is between staying on (or moving to) a non-LTS platform and upgrading frequently, or moving to 8.04 and dealing with larger virtual machines and more headaches each kernel update / VMware release. I have a feeling that many other people would benefit from having this available as well, even if it meant adding a few extra lines to /etc/apt/sources.list.

Thanks,

- Lowell