Specify minimum requirements for dependencies

[namurphy]

Description

This PR specifies minimum allowed versions of colorama, iniconfig, and packaging, and bumps the minimum requirement of exceptiongroup to no longer be a release candidate.

The first draft of this PR specifies minimum allowed versions that are several years old, but these can be changed to be more recent.

Motivation

uv has multiple dependency resolution strategies:

• lowest will install the lowest allowed version for all dependencies, both direct and indirect (transitive).
• lowest-direct will use the lowest compatible versions for all direct dependencies, while using the latest compatible versions for all other dependencies.

Up until now, pytest has not specified the minimum allowed versions of multiple dependencies in pyproject.toml. When I ran uv pip install pytest==8.3.5 --resolution=lowest in a fresh virtual environment, it installed packaging==14.0 (released in 2014 👀) and iniconfig==0.1 (released in 2010 😅).

It's a fairly common practice in the scientific pythoniverse to run tests against the oldest versions of dependencies. In practice, using uv's lowest dependency resolution strategy results the first release of certain indirect dependencies being installed, like v0.0.0.1. Specifying lower bounds will make it a lot more practical for pytest users to test against the oldest allowed versions of both indirect and direct dependencies.

Many thanks to everyone who has contributed to this awesome package! 🎉🎂🎆🪩🌌🥦

Checklist

• Include documentation when adding new features.
• Include new tests or update existing tests when applicable.
• Allow maintainers to push and squash when merging my commits. Please uncheck this if you prefer to squash the commits yourself.

If this change fixes an issue, please:

• Add text like closes #XYZW to the PR description and/or commits (where XYZW is the issue number). See the github docs for more information.

Unless your change is trivial or a small documentation fix (e.g., a typo or reword of a small section) please:

• Create a new changelog file in the changelog folder, with a name like <ISSUE NUMBER>.<TYPE>.rst. See changelog/README.rst for details.
• Add yourself to AUTHORS in alphabetical order.

[nicoddemus]

This all seems good @namurphy, thanks!

Any reason it is still in Draft stage? Otherwise seems good to merge to me, we don't need tests for this I think.

[namurphy]

Any reason it is still in Draft stage?

Nope, I was just waiting for tests to finish. Thank you for taking a look at this so quickly!

[nicoddemus]

Thanks @namurphy!