Property excludeScope in JavadocMethod check does not work correctly

[damianszczepanik]

Based on this http://checkstyle.sourceforge.net/config_javadoc.html#JavadocMethod documentation I understand that by default it checks all scopes except private. In other words this is relevant to:

        <module name="JavadocMethod">
            <property name="excludeScope" value="private"/>
        </module>

However I found in damianszczepanik/silencio/pull/42 that above comments generates 0 errors while following one

        <module name="JavadocMethod">
        </module>

complains that https://github.com/damianszczepanik/silencio/blob/b65764da81d118f40f19ee5e640fb2540bbba7c6/src/main/java/pl/szczepanik/silencio/diagnostics/ProcessorSmokeChecker.java#L45 has violation ProcessorSmokeChecker.java:45:5: Missing a Javadoc comment

Is that correct that excluding private from checker generates errors for public?

[mkordas]

The problem is in JavadocMethodCheck.java#L465-L468. There are even tests proving this incorrect behavior...
I'm on it.

[mkordas]

There is also another problem with excludeScope property. If it is set to protected as in com.puppycrawl.tools.checkstyle.checks.javadoc.JavadocMethodCheckTest#testExcludeScope, it still reports missing Javadoc on protected members. Test proves that incorrect behaviour e.g. by

"46:9: " + getCheckMessage(MSG_JAVADOC_MISSING),

when this line is just

protected void foo2() {}