EDIT

A solution might be to replace all "* @date " by "* @since "

Andreas Müller wrote:

A solution might be to replace all "* @date " by "* @since "

The doc says the since text is free, so we could use it for the creation date, but usually one would rather expect a version number for since.

Andreas Kohlbecker wrote:

Andreas Müller wrote:

A solution might be to replace all "* @date " by "* @since "

The doc says the since text is free, so we could use it for the creation date, but usually one would rather expect a version number for since.

That is true. But maybe we should start handling it this way. Version numbers are more useful than dates. However, the question is how we get eclipse to know the current version number and how if we want to update the existing tags.
I think we can live with existing tags being changed to @since with the given date.
For new tags it would be nice to have version number instead of date if possible.

AK: Ich habe auch nachgezählt bei den '@link reference not found' Problemen handelt es sich um 151 stellen die sich aber auf relativ wenige HotSpots konzentrieren, vom Aufwand halte ich das für absolut vertretbar.

There are far less problems as you've assumed after having a quick look. mvn javadoc:javadoc reports 294 broken @links for which reference classes or methods. This does not include test classes.

Maven provides a tool to interactively fix problems in javadoc tags (https://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-javadoc-plugin/fix-mojo.html) which is supposed to also fix @link tags.

mvn javadoc:fix

I did a test run of this tool. I did not fix the broken @links but it does a lot of other useful things. I think we should run this on our projects with selected parameters.