Questions about releasever change

Commit a52edb8c83e0006a6c0d3cc6071fb3f539e53d00 changed the returned value 
for version for provides. Previously the version was the part before the 
dash so that provide strings were treated like version-release. This has 
broken things that use $releasever.

I am curious about why this change was made?

More importantly, is this how things is going to stay? I need to know how 
to change fedora-release and generic-release to have the correct 
redhat-release provides version. Curently this is affecting both yum 
(Fedora bug 1040607) and livecd-creator (Fedora bug 1044675) and I'm 
looking for the correct changes to make to the provides in fedora-release 
and generic-release to fix yum, livecd-creator and anything we don't 
know about that checks for the release using redhat-release. (I'll also 
change livecd-creator to match yum's default for distropkg.)