Mark Dickinson added the comment:
> (1) should the 'signed' parameter remain keyword-only in 2.7?

We should keep it as a keyword-only argument.  Also, issue #1745 might bring keyword-only arguments to 2.7.

> (2) When specifying the byteorder, is there a need to allow u'big' and
> u'little' as well as 'big' and 'little'?

Allow both. Since, 'big' == u'big' is True, it would be weird to treat them differently in this case.

Plus, it will make life easier for people who uses:

  from __future__ import unicode_literals

in their code.