Easy way to determine part'n type without looking in part'n table?

[Mark van Walraven <markv@wave.co.nz>]

While looking for the bug Lauri described, I not only found it but also
discovered that approximately 1100 lines of code in libfdisk are *almost*
redundant.  So, ...

Does anyone know of an easier way to determine the type of an unmounted
partition than looking in the partition table?  Please?  Pretty please?

Thanks,

Mark.

P.S.  To add insult to injury, trivial changes to three lines of
linux/drivers/block/genhd.c would add 'ptype' and 'pnum' columns to
/proc/partitions.  Aauughh!