Thanks for your very thorough bug report. The changes to tiff2pdf.c in the Debian package are actually inherited from upstream, because we're tracking upstream development as that's the easiest way to deal with bugs etc, and upstream is very cooperative.
So I'd suggest filing this on upstream, because as you say, I'm not sure it's a good idea for me to patch the Debian package with this kind of might-break-something-else fix. Cheers, --Barak.
