VMware 17.5: Warning: program compiled against libxml 210 using older 209

[miechovy]

Sometimes I get the following message when executing tasks in Windows 10 via vmrun / API. For example:

vmrun -T ws -gu USER -gp PASSWORD runProgramInGuest /home/user/vm/server/server.vmx "C:\Users\user\Documents\script.bat"
Warning: program compiled against libxml 210 using older 209

What causes this warning? My host is Debian 11.

[Technogeezer]

My take on the error message is that the vmrun utility was compiled on a system containing a newer version of the libxml2 shared library. The warning is coming from the system indicating that your system contains an older version of the library.

If you're running Debian (or Ubuntu), it looks like they ship with an older version of the libxml2 package. Fedora 38 and later as well as OpenSUSE Tumbleweed seem to ship with the newer one. 

I don't think that there's anything you can (or should) do about the error message if everything is working. You can see if Debian has a newer version in their backports repository, but at least for arm64 architectures (which I'm using) they don't. 

[miechovy · Accepted solution]

To repair the issue, it was quietly easy on Debian 12:

sudo apt install libxml12-dev

and restart the system.