[development] Email address not required for registration in HEAD

I noticed that in the HEAD version patch notes, email address is no longer required for users. I have fairly urgent need of this functionality and was wondering if the patch/module here: http://drupal.org/node/61738 would be enough to do the trick or if there's something else that was done to implement it in core. It obviously looks like the change was done to user.module, but aside from that are there other differences? // Jeff Beeman