compile individual modules, i.e. module4.nim
compile individual tests, i.e. tmodule4.nim
compile all tests for a package, i.e. packageA/all.nim
compile individual modules in programs, i.e. module10

That's something the, still planned, nimble c file.nim feature should be able to handle.

compile programs, i.e. programA

That's a job for nimble build.

Your list of requirements is unfortunately rather big so I don't think Nimble can satisfy all of them.

Here is an outline of how the current work-flow would work, and yes, I know it's not ideal:

• Each package in framework would have a .nimble file.
• Each of these packages would need to be installed by executing nimble install in their directories, this would need to be repeated each time a change is made to these packages (I know, not ideal).
• Your programs can then each get a .nimble file also in which you can specify the dependencies on the required packages in your framework.
• You can then build your programs with nimble build.

Alternatively you can create a nim.cfg file in each of your programs directories with a --path:<p> directive, where <p> is a PATH to your packages. This means you won't need to constantly reinstall the packages when they are changed, but this will not work when the paths change.

I'm not clear how to resolve module name collisions

Your package modules are already in their own packageName dirs (packageA, packageB, etc...). What you should do is import the package's module like so: import packageName/module.

import packageName/module

This I cannot get to work. I can do "import module", and it happens to find the right one (by accident?), but I cannot qualify the import with a package name, at least not in conjunction with --NimblePath: "Error cannot open 'packageName/module'"