* add script to run 'act' local github actions tool (lets devs check github
actions on their local machine)
* Update various github actions to latest (so they can work with the 'act'
tool)
* change a few places where python version was not properly quoted as a
string (act yaml parser is more strict than the github version)
* update pylint min-version to work with recent github actions
* remove pandas/riden requirement (that's in my other branch for now)
