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Context: together with Jérome we've been struggling with porting Zodbtools to
Python3 for several years. Despite several incremental attempts[1,2,3]
we are not there yet with the main difficulty being backward compatibility breakage
that Python3 did for bytes and unicode. During my last trial this spring, after
I've tried once again to finish this porting and could not reach satisfactory
result, I've finally decided to do something about this at the root of the
cause: at the level of strings - where backward compatibility was broken - with
the idea to fix everything once and for all.

In 2018 in "Python 3 Losses: Nexedi Perspective"[4] and associated "cost
overview"[5] Jean-Paul highlighted the problem of strings backward
compatibility breakage, that Python 3 did, as the major one.

In 2019 we had some conversations with Jérome about this topic as well[6,7].

In 2020 I've started to approach it with `b` and `u` that provide
always-working conversion in between byte...