[parted-devel] Question about partition id's

[Phil Susi]

On 10/17/2017 5:33 PM, Kristian - wrote:
> I agree with you Phil, parted should hide complexity to the user. But
> I don't think this information is useless for all users, or better
> speaking: for all library front end's. I see that parted does not
> display this information, and maybe it is not interested in. Anyway,
> this information is stored in the partition table but, using
> libparted, we can't read or modify it without extremely crappy
> trick's. Other partitioning programs let the user view and change
> this field. Why programs using libparted shouldn't offer this
> functionality?

I think that historically libparted was designed to try to provide a
common unified api for all partition table types, and partition type
codes are highly partition table specific.  If someone wanted to add a
new interface to allow passing an arbitrary string to be interpreted by
the specific partition table as some kind of appropriate type code, I
would not be opposed to it.