the real solution would be to copy the config.rpath [1] from your distro into the source dir. this requires the gettext devel files to be installed.
i'm not using nls/gettext. afaict, it's not even mentioned (in configure, doc, INSTALL, etc) as an option. then, gettext shouldn't be a requirement (even though it's installed on my system ...).
the point is, the check for the file is there, but the file is not included. autogen.sh *would* copy it if i spec'd the location of my gettext in /usr/local/share (odd that the check wouldn't be for 'standard' locations ... ), but, again, why's it asked for?
now the question is when using the 1.1b9 tarball. why do you run autogen.sh at all?
i'm not using the tarball -- rather
hg clone -r1.1.beta9 http://hg.dovecot.org/dovecot
instructions, of course, are:
"If you got Dovecot from Mercurial, for instance with
---%<------------------------------------------------------------------------- hg clone http://hg.dovecot.org/dovecot/ ---%<-------------------------------------------------------------------------
you will first need to run './autogen.sh' to generate the 'configure' script and some other files."