Accept native TOML types for the remaining built-in ini options

[RonnyPfannschmidt]

Requested by Ronny · project thread

🤖 Written by Claude Opus 5.5 via Claude Code for the pytest maintainers; I prompted it, it did the work, I read it.

Follow-up to #14692, #14954 and #15133. This finishes the job for every built-in option whose value is naturally a number, a boolean or a fixed choice.

Before: in a native pytest.toml / [tool.pytest] config, verbosity_assertions = 2, tmp_path_retention_count = 3, log_level = 10 or log_auto_indent = true failed with "expects a string, got int/bool", and the docs told users to quote them. log_file_mode = "x" crashed with an INTERNALERROR, and an unknown parametrize_long_str_id_strategy was only caught when a long id was generated.

After: these values are accepted unquoted. Quoted strings and ini files keep working. Invalid choices are reported as a UsageError when the option is read.

option	new type
verbosity_assertions, verbosity_test_cases, verbosity_subtests	int | Literal["auto"]
tmp_path_retention_count	int | str (default is now 3)
log_level, log_cli_level, log_file_level	int | str
log_auto_indent	int | bool | str
log_file_mode	Literal["w", "a"]
parametrize_long_str_id_strategy	its Literal choices

How: these options now use the addini(type=...) expressions from #14751 and #14791. get_log_level_for_setting now handles int levels directly. An int 0 (NOTSET) still counts as set, matching the old "0" string. The int | bool | str order for log_auto_indent keeps ini "1" meaning one space, not True.

Compat note: because union members are tried in order, getini() now returns int for ini-file values like verbosity_assertions = 2 or log_level = 10, where it used to return a str. This is the same trade-off #14954 made for max_warnings. Callers in pytest already convert with int(). A third-party plugin that calls getini() on these options and expects a str would see the change.

Docs: the "must be quoted in TOML" notes are removed. The TOML minversion = 3.0 example is now quoted, because a float is rejected there and would turn 8.10 into 8.1. Copy-pasted log_cli_level lines in the log_level and log_file_level examples are fixed, and the --help dump is refreshed (it also had a stale faulthandler_timeout).

• Include new tests or update existing tests when applicable.
• Allow maintainers to push and squash when merging my commits.
• If AI agents were used, they are credited in Co-authored-by commit trailers.
• Create a new changelog file in the changelog directory.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

https://claude.ai/code/session_01KnFJBdcVQB59PKYw3q1w7X

---

Generated by Claude Code

[Pierre-Sassoulas]

Satisfying cleanup !