Bug 6312446 had a thoughtlessly worded synopsis because the bug description served as a qualification that only a specific (uncontroversial) clause of 17.9 would go into the Thread.sleep javadoc as a clarification (see the "original problem description" of 5068368). 

This change request finishes the job of putting all of the rest of the 17.9 spec related to Thread.sleep into the sleep  methodjavadoc, subject to condensing for the sake of javadoc brevity. Specifically the 17.9 text would be changed in the following two ways before inclusion in the javadoc:

  1) The text "nor a yield operation" will be omitted, as this is a spec for a different method, not sleep.
  2) The text starting with "It is important to note" will be summarized for the javadoc by the statement "Thread.sleep does not have any synchronization semantics."