About your patch : Well, adding mawk into configure.ac is not enough.

Look at po/*/Makevars. There is a hardcoded reference to gawk.
I do not remember exactly why the full path of awk is mandatory in one of the 2
scripts using it: po/update-potfiles and po/xgettext-wrapper.

If you get an other working solution, without the harcoded reference to gawk, we
take it !

Thx.