For posterity: A kind volunteer has now upstreamed the Ubuntu patches at the aforementioned fork:
https://github.com/targetdisk/hfsutils/pull/1 The owner of the fork hasn't taken action yet to merge the PR. But the patches at least exist in an easily accessible way.
publickey - [email protected] - 0x3C47642E.asc
Description: application/pgp-keys
signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
