Choice iterator breaks when using slices

[David]

Currently the choice-iterator classes introduced in https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/24561 are designed to work with index-based access.

   

class MyModel(models.Model):
  field = models.IntegerField(choices=lambda: range(10))


the_field = MyModel._meta.get_field("field")
the_field.choices[2]
#> 3

Since choices has been out for long time accepting there are libraries in which the field.choices attribute was used as it it was a tuple/list, which can be accessed also with slicing syntax (see ​sphinxcontrib-django ), this now raises an error:

the_field.choices[:2]
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
TypeError                                 Traceback (most recent call last)
Cell In[13], line 1
----> 1 the_field.choices[:2]

File /opt/venv/lib/python3.10/site-packages/django/utils/choices.py:24, in BaseChoiceIterator.__getitem__(self, index)
     23 def __getitem__(self, index):
---> 24     if index < 0:
     25         # Suboptimally consume whole iterator to handle negative index.
     26         return list(self)[index]
     27     try:
TypeError: '<' not supported between instances of 'slice' and 'int'

The ​__getitem__ states that the management of key type should be handled in the implementation.

It should be choosen if slices are going to be supported or if only integers are going to be supported by this class.