list unpack trick?

[aurora]

I find that I use some list unpacking construct very often:

	name, value = s.split('=',1)

So that 'a=1' unpack as name='a' and value='1' and 'a=b=c' unpack as  
name='a' and value='b=c'.

The only issue is when s does not contain the character '=', let's say it  
is 'xyz', the result list has a len of 1 and the unpacking would fail. Is  
there some really handy trick to pack the result list into len of 2 so  
that it unpack as name='xyz' and value=''?

So more generally, is there an easy way to pad a list into length of n  
with filler items appended at the end?