Clean up the "Obtaining the Static Analyzer" page

[NagyDonat]

The "Obtaining the Static Analyzer" page within our documentation is obsolete:

• It claims that "Currently there are no officially supported binary distributions for the static analyzer. You must build Clang and LLVM manually.", which is wildly inaccurate, as AFAIK the analyzer is available within the regular clang packages of the various package managers.
• Moreover, the [Legacy] sections about ancient (9+ years old) binary builds should be removed, because their presence is useless and somewhat embarrassing.

@steakhal @Xazax-hun @haoNoQ What do you think about this? Do we even need this page or can we simply say that the analyzer is part of clang? (In the latter case we can direct the users to the Installation page of clang e.g. with a brief note on the top-level page of the analyzer docs.) Is there any reason to keep the [Legacy] content?

For reference, as of now (Oct 29, 2025) this page contains the following content:

[llvmbot]

@llvm/issue-subscribers-clang-static-analyzer

Author: Donát Nagy (NagyDonat)

The ["Obtaining the Static Analyzer" page](https://clang.llvm.org/docs/analyzer/user-docs/Installation.html) within our documentation is obsolete: - It claims that "Currently there are no officially supported binary distributions for the static analyzer. You must build Clang and LLVM manually.", which is wildly inaccurate, as AFAIK the analyzer is available within the regular clang packages of the various package managers. - Moreover, the [Legacy] sections about ancient (9+ years old) binary builds should be removed, because their presence is useless and somewhat embarrassing.

@steakhal @Xazax-hun @haoNoQ What do you think about this? Do we even need this page or can we simply say that the analyzer is part of clang? (In the latter case we can direct the users to the Installation page of clang e.g. with a brief note on the top-level page of the analyzer docs.) Is there any reason to keep the [Legacy] content?

For reference, as of now (Oct 29, 2025) this page contains the following content:

<img width="1280" height="988" alt="Image" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/ebe0ad4a-eaf8-482d-96b9-44eaf6bf27b5" />

[steakhal]

The LLVM org does not endorse any linux distribution or package managers.
This is likely done so for legal reasons and to avoid fallouts from the consequences of a potentially compromised distributor.

I'd rather just point to https://releases.llvm.org/ for grabbing a release. That has links to the GitHub release pages if necessary.
That said, this indirection might seem pointless, but it's not. There were plans to use a separate GH repo for hosting the releases as a way to restrict access to who can upload and what binaries and files. In the current model, AFAIK all committers can/could upload artifacts, and we all know that the bar for commit access is not too high.

Anyways, I'd say the safes is to just link to https://releases.llvm.org/

[NagyDonat]

The LLVM org does not endorse any linux distribution or package managers. This is likely done so for legal reasons and to avoid fallouts from the consequences of a potentially compromised distributor.

Thanks for the info! I only mentioned the package managers as a trivial counterexample to "You must build Clang and LLVM manually"; I agree that we shouldn't link to packages of random linux distributions.

[...] Anyways, I'd say the safes is to just link to https://releases.llvm.org/

I completely agree.

---

@steakhal @ anyone else interested
Is it OK if I remove this "Obtaining the Static Analyzer" page and replace it with a short paragraph (on the main documentation page https://clang.llvm.org/docs/ClangStaticAnalyzer.html) which links to https://releases.llvm.org/ ?

[steakhal]

Please do.

[NagyDonat]

I created a commit for it.

By the way, as I was adding a link to the LLVM Download page, I realized that there are two "LLVM Download page"s and one of them is obsolete: #166196 🙃