Gitea + Renovate + [] = KaTeX parse error

[deltamualpha]

How are you running Renovate?

Self-hosted Renovate

If you're self-hosting Renovate, tell us which platform (GitHub, GitLab, etc) and which version of Renovate.

newest gitea; always latest renovate release

Please tell us more about your question or problem

I'm not entirely sure if this is a gitea bug or a renovate bug.

When a project's release notes include [], Renovate appears to insert a \ before the opening [ in order to, I'm guessing, prevent it from appearing as an invalid link for weird markdown parsers. For example, woodpecker-ci includes lines like

* [release/v2.8] Don't fail user creation if org exists ([#4687](https://github.com/woodpecker-ci/woodpecker/issues/4687)) [[#4692](https://github.com/woodpecker-ci/woodpecker/pull/4692)]

in its release notes: https://github.com/woodpecker-ci/woodpecker/releases/tag/v2.8.3

When renovate opens an MR with that line inside, it translates it into:

-   \[release/v2.8] Don't fail user creation if org exists ([#​4687](https://github.com/woodpecker-ci/woodpecker/issues/4687)) \[[#​4692](https://github.com/woodpecker-ci/woodpecker/pull/4692)]

When gitea attempts to render this through its own MR rendering pipeline, I think it's parsing that opening \[ as starting a TeX-style formatting block, which eventually croaks on trying to parse the HTML-encode ZWSP and generating an error:

Is this \[ escaping really required? Is renovate even generating it? Should I file with gitea instead?

EDIT: I've also found the release notes for gitea that added TeX support, and it confirms that what's tripping up the parser is the presence of \[ \]: https://blog.gitea.com/release-of-1.18.0/#rocket-latex-math-rendering-for-markdown-20571

Gitea can now render mathematical formulas using latex syntax inside $…$, $$…$$, \[…\], and \(…\) in markdown content.

Github appears to parse and then discard those same LaTeX fences, so this might be a gitea bug after all.

Logs (if relevant)

Logs

I don't believe there are relevant logs.

[deltamualpha]

Aha, even better, there's a relevant gitea bug about the problems of the \[ ... \] syntax: go-gitea/gitea#27645. I think this is not actually something that renovate is doing wrong, but a poor interaction between the software. Closing.