As part of clearing doclint warnings from the JDK code base (JDK-8071630), it has been observed that neither the doclint checking that could be done by javac during a JDK build nor the doclint checking that could be done by javadoc during a docs build aligns well with the portions of the JDK code base that have been cleared of javadoc warnings.

Attempting to use doclint with javac would require fixing thousands of warnings in the sun.*, com.sun.*, and jdk.internal.* packages for which javadoc is not generated.

Attempting to use doclint with javadoc would require fixing thousands of warnings in the corba, jaxp, and jaxws repositories, which is a noble goal, but not one likely to be achieved any time soon.

Despite this, most of the packages in the jdk Hg repository for which documentation is generated are clear or nearly clear of doclint warnings. However, they are at constant risk of doclint regressions being introduced since there is no on-going programmatic enforcement of doclint checks.

If doclint checking could be enabled in javac for only for type meeting a package name filter, that would allow enforcement of a useful and practical doclint policy. (Filtering on modules instead of packages would be too coarse since not all types in a module are exported or have javadoc generated for them.)