Comment 40 for bug 978333

> Shoudn't it send a SmSaveGlobal, so they can ask the user for any unsaved work?

I don't know - what do other desktops do? https://live.gnome.org/SessionManagement/NotesOnXSMP under section "SaveYourselfRequest (p. 6)" seems to echo your complaint:

"Session managers generally don't let the client decide whether or not to save the session when calling SaveYourselfRequest; they use a combination of preferences/settings and logout-dialog buttons to decide. In theory then, the session manager should just ignore the passed-in save-type, and set the save-type of the SaveYourself messages to SmSaveGlobal or SmSaveBoth depending on whether it's just shutting down, or also saving the state. This is what ksmserver does, but old-gnome-session and xfce-session are both buggy:

xfce-session only sends SaveYourselfs at all if the user chooses to save the session (in which case it sends the SaveYourselfs with the requested save-type); if the session is not being saved, it just skips over the SaveYourself phase entirely and goes directly to Die. (Technically, that violates the spec, although it violates it in a way that no client can detect, so it doesn't really matter.)

if you pass SmSaveGlobal to xfce-session, and the user chooses to save their state, then correctly-written clients will not save their state."

It looks like it would be possible to change the behaviour to match ksmserver as described above, from a quick look I'd guess it calls sm_save_yourself_request in sm-layer.c and then xfsm_manager_save_yourself_global in xfsm-manager.c, you probably just need to override save_type there and set it to SmSaveGlobal or SmSaveBoth just above the "if (!shutdown || shutdown_save) { shutdown with save } else { shutdown without save }" code.