GNU gettext and incorrectly-marked "obsolete" entries

[Kevin L]

I've got code that looks like this (pseudo):

char message_array[][] {
        "KEY_1",
        "KEY_2",
        "KEY_3",
...
}

I'm using gettext to turn KEY_1 into a translated string:

        char * key = message_array[2];
        char * output_string = _(key);

Very similar to a Java ResourceBundle.  Worked great until today when I 
"up"graded to gettext 0.14.1.

With the new suite of tools:  autoconf 2.59, automake 1.7.9, gettext 0.14.1, the 
new build process marks the translations for KEY_1, KEY_2, etc. as "obsolete". 
Right now my application is horribly broken without these translated strings 
appearing in the output.

Digging into the docs for msgmerge, I can't see any way to force msgmerge NOT to 
do this.

The very reason I'm using these obvious keys is so that I can quickly tell how 
much has been translated.  I WAS going to replace the keys with the default 
English strings before I got to 1.0, but if I can't find a way to get msgmerge 
to include these strings that aren't directly used then my users will be stuck 
with English-only strings in some very important parts of the application. 
That's a can of worms I really don't want to open.

Is there a hopefully trivial way to get the old behavior back?  Or should I edit 
and recompile msgmerge without the "obsolete" string marking?