@christianp @HankLloydRight are they on track to merge into the main branch of Mastodon, or is it a forever fork?

@Phil @HankLloydRight this implementation will never be merged in - post-processing in the client for certain plain-text delimiters is too arbitrary.
One day we might process latex to mathml and produce a version of posts that clients can render directly, but there are still lots of problems: active client support is the biggest practical problem, and abuse to achieve weird layouts or bypass filters is a hard social problem for admins not interested in math

@Phil @christianp
And since I know very little about the internals of Mastodon or Ruby or RAILS, I'm not one to start messing with patches and such because I know from great experience, that as soon as I do, something will break, and I'll have no idea how to fix it, then spend two days going down the rabbit hole of googling the error codes and trying to find the fix. Then some dependency breaks, and the the process starts all over again. /1

@HankLloydRight @Phil I've been there before! A bit of software you don't understand and have to support is like a millstone round your neck

@Phil @christianp
A couple of years ago I spent weeks tracking down a single "Error 56" when trying to compile a Cordova project. After several days in dependency hell, it actually turned out to be that some module in the tool chain didn't like that I was setting the opacity=.1 -- no, it had to be opacity=0.1 🙄