the recommendation to the debian-maintainer should be: please upgrade to the lasted, fixed version from cvs.
regarding the last point: the changes have nothing to do with naviserver, but to bring po to the same level as oacs (e.g fix old-style sql quoting, get rid of deprecated functions, make po installable from scratch with pg 9.3, etc. my hope was mostly, to get the free PO components installable via repository, similar as dotlrn is now installable via repo, but this seems still a longer way.