Dear Louis-Philippe: Sorry for the late reply and thanks a lot for the patch.
I have just uploaded gettext 0.21 which I had almost-ready, based on the work by Zack Weinberg. You can get the packages from this URL: https://people.debian.org/~sanvila/gettext/ Would be possible for you to rebase the patches you sent for this bug for version 0.21? That would make everything a lot easier. I would then upload it as version 0.21-2 (maybe with no changes at all). Thanks.