Consider recommending building with the Clang plugin

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Assessment

Difficulty
1/5
Estimated time
Under an hour
Newbie friendliness
55/100
Issue type
Documentation
Clarity
Clearly specified
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
cpp
Domain
documentation

Research direction

Open the linked Thunderbird build configuration section and review how local mozconfig options are documented. Add the recommendation to enable the Clang plugin with the provided ac_add_options --enable-clang-plugin snippet, then verify the developer documentation page renders correctly.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

mozilla-central includes an internal Clang plugin that adds static-analysis checks at build-time, to ensure things like proper use of smart pointers in C++: https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/code-quality/static-analysis/existing.html#build-time-static-analysis

A list of checks that are performed by this plugin can be found here: https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/5a7e5e2e1fe04028fc77787084caf9b26ab74ce6/mfbt/Attributes.h#511

Both comm-central and try-comm-central build with this plugin, so I think we should recommend developers and contributors also enable it for their local builds to prevent bustages, by adding the following to their mozconfig file:

ac_add_options --enable-clang-plugin

A good location for this recommendation could be in this section: https://developer.thunderbird.net/thunderbird-development/building-thunderbird#build-configuration

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