Mercurial - what is "future auditing"?

Question

I was reading the docs. In the section about Mercurial's bookmarks system, I read this:

Bookmarks can be used as an alternative to NamedBranches for tracking multiple lines of development. Systems like Mercurial, CVS, and Subversion store their branch information as a permanent part of each commit. This is useful for future auditing of long-lived branches, as it’s always possible to identify which branch a commit was introduced on. Git, by contrast, has “branches” that are not stored in history, which is useful for working with numerous short-lived feature branches, but makes future auditing impossible.

I tried searching the web for "future auditing" pertaining to mercurial, but almost every article has the exact same text as quoted above, as if they all ganked this documentation from the same place.

What is this mysterious "future auditing" that is supposedly impossible in git?

Thank you.

Answer 1

This is the same audit than the one mentioned in "Deleting git branch looses audit":

Branches in git can be deleted or renamed at any time.

if the merge was not a fast-forward you will see that the commits were made to a branch that was later merged, but you won't know what the branch was originally called.

You can see it illustrated in More On Mercurial vs. Git (with Graphs!) (2011)