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Raymond, from your first post on this topic, it seems as
though you were previously implementing this functionality
in binascii for some particular reason, and it seems as
though it is to be included with binascii in the future,
regardless of the outcome of this particular feature request.

The only reason the binascii solution is better than status
quo, is because a user doesn't need to implement arbitrarily
large integer packing and unpacking themselves.  On the
other hand, it still requires the user make manual
binascii.str_to_long(str_obj) calls in the case of it being
part of a struct, so doesn't gain significantly.

Now, one of the reasons why I requested a format code
addition was because one can (un)pack multiple data types
simultaneously with a single function call via struct.  In
nearly all of the use cases I have for packing and unpacking
large integers, they are a part of other structures.

In the cases where I have been packing and unpacking single
integers, floats, etc., I still use struct because it is has
nearly all of the functionality I need (signed, unsigned,
big endian, little endian, char, short, long, long long,
etc., lacking only arbitrarily large integer packing and
unpacking).