A long-lived Engineering Lab needs memory, but memory does not automatically mean a database.
For this Lab, the repository is the durable record.
Content, project metadata, relationships, decisions and release history can all live beside the implementation that produced them. That makes the archive inspectable, versioned and recoverable with the same tools used to build the systems it describes.
The important boundary is that the website is a view of the record, not the record itself.
If a generated page disappears, the repository can rebuild it. If an interface changes, the underlying history remains. If a relationship is broken, the build can detect it.
This keeps the archive aligned with the engineering principle already used elsewhere in the Lab: make authoritative state explicit and keep derived views disposable.
The repository is therefore not merely source code storage. It is the Lab’s long-term memory.