Btw, can someone explain in greater details what exactly is the intended
outcome of this change. Frankly, it's not quite clear to me (
and as an Emacs and Mac user, such changes are of general interest to me.

On 1 January 2016 at 02:40, Jean-Christophe Helary <
jean.christophe.helary@gmail.com> wrote:

>
> > On Jan 1, 2016, at 01:02, John Wiegley <jwiegley@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Since there are people in both camps (i.e., people who will configure
> Emacs to
> > the other pattern no matter what we do), it's hard to argue that one
> should
> > necessarily be the default over the other.
>
> For all the other Mac applications (except Xquartz) Alt is used to compose
> characters that are not by default in the keyboard layout. That's one of
> the very strong point of OSX machines by the way. On a standard JIS
> keyboard I can type French without having to change the layout, or English,
> or Japanese, out of the box.
>
> The default for Emacs on Mac should be the OS default so that new users
> who are used to that behavior do not have to search for the Emacs way to
> use their keyboard the standard way...
>
> Jean-Christophe Helary
>