Below is a list of features I plan to complete for 4.8.

The “Status” lines are accurate as of 2009/09/18.

See here.

Status: 5% complete.

The autostart editor and session editor in the settings dialog should be merged into one to avoid confusion. Users shouldn't need to understand by what mechanism apps are started at login (either session-managed or XDG autostart).

This work depends on the “Session Storage” work above.

Status: 0% complete.

How xfce4-session handles power management is a bit of a mess. It can use HAL to shutdown, reboot, suspend, and hibernate, or fall back to a sudo-based helper for shutdown and reboot.

I'd like to get the HAL-based suspend/hibernate related code out of xfce4-session, or at least relegate it to a fallback. When DeviceKit-power becomes more well-used, HAL will likely go away anyway, and I'd like to avoid supporting a lot of different things of this nature since I don't think it should be the session manager's job. Ali has written a wonderful power manager for Xfce, and it does a great job of handling suspend and hibernate, so we should pass off those tasks to the org.freedesktop.PowerManagement DBus interface when possible.

However, handling of rebooting and shutting down is a bit more complicated. It's unclear as to whether the SM or PM should be handling these tasks.

There's also ConsoleKit, which is capable of rebooting and shutting down the system. My gut feeling here is that CK should be the preferred method for reboot/shutdown.

Status: 90% complete. Some details might need to be improved. Needs testing.

Refactor how SM properties are stored by the manager. Part of the motivation for this is to make the code cleaner and easier to maintain. The practical result is that xfce4-session will allow clients to store SM properties with arbitrary names. In 4.6, xfce4-session only allows the client to set the properties described in the XSMP spec, plus the _GSM_Priority extension property. Status: 100% complete. Merged into master.

For reboot and shutdown, systems will start requiring authorization via PolicyKit. Xfce4-session should be able to talk to PK to obtain the necessary authorizations. Note: Apparently PK is undergoing an API/architecture rewrite. I won't be working on this until that has sabilized, so this feature may be postponed to 4.10. Status: 100% complete.