Transfer Publishers in Marketplace

[waderyan]

Two questions that came up on Twitter.

1. Is it possible to transfer ownership? If not, can we get that added?
2. How to add multiple users to a publisher account?

I'm reaching out to the marketplace friends to find out the answer.

[waderyan]

Ping @hamenon

[hamenon]

We can technically transfer ownership of an extension, but just be aware that moving the extension under a different publisher will change the extension’s fully-qualified identifier. This could impact clients, like VS Code, that try to look up the extension by its old ID.

If the extension doesn’t have a lot of downloads, it might be easier to just remove from the old publisher and re-publish under the new publisher.

Following is an example shared by Erich Gamma where a change publisher was done by creating a new extension under the new publisher and deprecating the old one.

https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode-editorconfig/issues/23#issuecomment-184427296.

[hamenon]

Will get back to you soon on adding multiple users to the same publisher account.

[waderyan]

@gep13 see above.

[gep13]

@waderyan thanks! I have set up a subscription on this issue now, and will follow along with it. Let me know if there is something you want me to test out.

[gep13]

The extension in question is this one:

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=cake-build.cake-vscode

The publisher ID is what we want, i.e. cake-build, however, the publisher exists under @patriksvensson own account. Ideally, we would want to move the publisher under an account that we (the Cake development team) all have access to. Thanks!

[hamenon]

@gep13 you can edit a publisher now and add multiple users into the same publisher. On the publisher page click on the edit publisher options from the drop down.

You can then add multiple users under different roles. The roles are:

• Reader – can see the publisher in the publisher drop-down and view all of its extensions
• Creator – can see the publisher and can upload new extensions (but cannot delete other extensions)
• Contributor – everything a reader can do, plus the ability to upload new and delete existing extensions
• Owner – everything a contribution can do, plus the ability to manage roles

Do let me know if this helps.

[gep13]

@hamenon this sounds like exactly what we need. We will give this a try, and let you know how it goes!