livecheck.regex problems due to r26041?

Could our recent livecheck regex issues (where regexes that we thought worked before suddenly are requiring additional escaping) be due to r26041? http://trac.macosforge.org/projects/macports/changeset/26041 The log message reads "Fix livecheck to properly de-escape livecheck.url" and the revision does indeed do that. But it also changes the processing of livecheck.regex without explaining why.