[Feature]: Replace requirements-min.txt with other testing method

[rly]

What would you like to see added to HDMF?

In at least 4 separate cases, external developers have confused requirements-min.txt (or requirements.txt which has since been removed) as the pinned requirements used by the package, when in fact, it is used only for reproducible testing of minimum requirements.

Although pip does not yet include a way to specify installing a package with its minimum (lower bound) version of dependencies (ref: pypa/pip#8085), other package dependency resolvers such as uv and pdm support this.

What solution would you like?

uv pip install . --resolution lowest-direct: https://docs.astral.sh/uv/concepts/resolution/#resolution-strategy

For minimum version testing, we may want to use this and get rid of the confusing requirements-min.txt file.

Alternatively, we could write a little script that extracts the minimum versions of dependencies and installs those.

Do you have any interest in helping implement the feature?

Yes.