Originally, the attribute attribute in @AliasFor was required; however, we later made it optional when the aliasing attribute and the aliased attribute (in a meta-annotation) have the same name.
For example, the path attribute in @GetMapping omits the attribute = "path" declaration, since the annotation = RequestMapping.class is sufficient.
/**
* Alias for {@link RequestMapping#path}.
*/
@AliasFor(annotation = RequestMapping.class)
String[] path() default {};
We should therefore document this feature in the Javadoc for @AliasFor to make users aware of this.