# Discover breakage in notebooks

**URL:** <https://talk.observablehq.com/t/discover-breakage-in-notebooks/2839>\
**Category:** Help\
**Created:** [February 16, 2020, 10:08am UTC](https://talk.observablehq.com/t/discover-breakage-in-notebooks/2839 "2020-02-16T10:08:11Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![pentacular](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/flex030/user_avatar/talk.observablehq.com/pentacular/32/2502_2.png) [@pentacular](https://talk.observablehq.com/u/pentacular)\
**Post date:** [February 16, 2020, 10:08am UTC](https://talk.observablehq.com/t/discover-breakage-in-notebooks/2839/1 "2020-02-16T10:08:11Z")

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Is there an efficient way to discover which notebooks contain errors after republishing a dependency of those notebooks?

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![mbostock](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/flex030/user_avatar/talk.observablehq.com/mbostock/32/9_2.png) [@mbostock](https://talk.observablehq.com/u/mbostock)\
**Post date:** [February 16, 2020, 5:26pm UTC](https://talk.observablehq.com/t/discover-breakage-in-notebooks/2839/2 "2020-02-16T17:26:09Z")

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None immediately come to mind, unfortunately, but you can pin the version number of an import so that it always sees the same version of the notebook.

For example, to import the current version of the Vega-Lite API notebook, you can say:

```auto
import {vl} from "@vega/vega-lite-api@319"

```

To determine the latest version number, you can open the notebook’s history for a notebook you own, or you can download the code for a notebook and look at the included README.

In the not-so-distant future, our plan is to make version pinning happen automatically, so that notebook imports (and library requires!) are stable by default, even for transitive dependencies. It’s not a trivial task, however. Apologies for it not yet being available.

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![pentacular](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/flex030/user_avatar/talk.observablehq.com/pentacular/32/2502_2.png) [@pentacular](https://talk.observablehq.com/u/pentacular)\
**Post date:** [February 17, 2020, 1:41am UTC](https://talk.observablehq.com/t/discover-breakage-in-notebooks/2839/3 "2020-02-17T01:41:41Z")

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How about a way to discover the notebooks directly and indirectly dependent upon a given notebook?