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As I provide in the feature request, there is already a
method for translating string <-> long.

The problem with current methods for converting between
large integers and strings is that they do not lend
themselves to generally being understandable or to being
documented.

The struct module already provides two appropriate functions
for handling packed binary data, a place for documenting
functions involving packing and unpacking binary data, and
whose implementation seems to be simple enough (one more
format character, much of which borrowed from 's' character,
and a call to _PyLong_FromByteArray seems to be sufficient).

As for the binascii module, many of the functions listed
seem like they should be wrapped into the encode/decode
string methods, hexlify already being so in str.encode('hex').

To me, just being able to translate doesn't seem sufficient
(we already can translate), but being able to do it well,
have it documented well, and placed in a location that is
obvious, fast and optimized for these kinds of things seems
to be the right thing.

From what I can tell, the only reason why struct doesn't
already have an equivalent format character to the proposed
'g' and 'G', is because the module was created to handle
packed C structs and seemingly "nothing else".  Considering
there doesn't seem to be any other reasonable or easily
documentable location for placing equivalent functionality
(both packing and unpacking), I am of the opinion that
restricting the packing and unpacking to C types in the
struct module (when there are other useful types) is overkill.

As I said, I will provide an implementation if desired.