Switching between versions of dialects

[MauroPfister]

I was wondering if there is an easy way to switch between different versions of dialects in code.

We are using a custom dialect to communicate with various devices over mavlink. Not all these devices necessarily use the same version of the dialect and we would like to be able to switch which dialect we're using depending on what device we are connected to.

Is there some way to achieve this?

I assume that I would have to generate the python modules for each version of the dialect according to these instructions and then make them available to mavlink by setting the MAVLINK_DIALECT and MDEF environment variables as mentioned here?

[peterbarker]

No easy way to do that. You can include the new xml in all.xml and use the all dialect, however.

[MauroPfister]

The problem here is that these dialects contain mostly the same messages but might be incompatible because some message definitions are different. I guess in this case I couldn't just include them in all.xml because the same message would be defined multiple times. Besides that, there would be no way of versionning the different dialects.

I recently discovered, that I can simply add the generated dialect .py files to the dialects/v20/ folder of the pymavlink installation and then select that dialect with mavutil.set_dialect("my_dialect.py"). However, it doesn't seem possible to load these dialect files from another location (which would solve my problem). Is there any reason for this?