GitHub's broken redirection of Pages

I really love GitHub and their product makes my life much easier. Heck, I’m even writing this post from Atom! But their GitHub Pages redirection is truly broken, and I need a solution. Here’s my problem.

My Hana C++ metaprogramming library was accepted into Boost. That’s great, and I’ve been working hard to polish some rough edges and stabilize the interface so it can be shipped with the next Boost release and start being used in production. The last step towards this goal is to integrate Hana with the rest of Boost, part of which means transferring the ownership of the GitHub repository from me (ldionne) to the Boost organization (boostorg).

GitHub allows doing this very easily. Basically, you just go to your admin panel and say “transfer ownership to boostorg”. When you press the button, all the links, pushes, pulls and hooks are redirected to the new repository. Great, right? Yes, except GitHub Pages sites are not redirected. This means that anyone going to ldionne.github.io/hana will now get a 404 instead of being redirected to boostorg.github.io/hana, as it ought to be. That’s a real bummer, since I use GitHub Pages to host my documentation, and the web contains two years worth of links to that documentation.

So I basically have two choices. The first one is to use GitHub’s broken redirection and break all the links to my documentation. The other one is to ditch GitHub’s redirection by transferring the repository and then overwriting the old repository with a new one saying “this project has moved”. Unfortunately, this will disable any automatic redirection to the new repository, thus breaking an unknown amount of things (e.g. scripts and existing clones), but at least giving users an informative message instead of a 404.

Has anyone been through a similar dilemma? Why should I favor one option over the other? If you have a solution, please let me know!

By the way, I contacted GitHub support and they said they would consider adding that feature. To me, that’s a bug more than a missing feature. Anyway, you can track the progression of the issue here.