Is Skype in partener repository the same as from website?

Question

I have noticed that in the partner repository that there is a package called skype, is this the same package that you get from the Skype website? And is it managed by Microsoft too? Or is there any difference in the managing of the two packages, or their versions or anything?

I noticed this because when I did apt-cache policy skype I got:

skype:
  Installed: (none)
  Candidate: 4.3.0.37-0ubuntu0.12.04.1
  Version table:
     4.3.0.37-0ubuntu0.12.04.1 0
        500 http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu/ vivid/partner amd64 Packages

Answer 1

You can get the version number of the repo package using

apt-cache policy skype

For my 14.04.2 setup, this returns:

skype:
  Installed: (none)
  Candidate: 4.3.0.37-0ubuntu0.12.04.1
  Version table:
     4.3.0.37-0ubuntu0.12.04.1 0
        500 http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu/ trusty/partner amd64 Packages

So the version in the Trusty repos is 4.3.0.37-0. The package downloaded from Skype's website is named

skype-ubuntu-precise_4.3.0.37-1_i386.deb

So it has version 4.3.0.37-1.

The number after the hyphen usually indicates a change in the packaging, not in the software itself.

The fact that the package is called ubuntu-precise means that it was packaged for 12.04 Precise Pangolin. So one can see that the software hasn't undergone any change in the past two years (or that the devs were too lazy to update the version number in the package control file...)

So eventually both packages ship with the same version of Skype. If you, however, compare apt-cache show skype with the DEBIAN/control file of the package from the website, you'll see that the packages are maintained by different people. Still, the software is the same.