I agree with Nikita. Theoretically one could write a set of checks for every API that is out there. Not everyone cares about all checks, and since many important APIs are private (or just not relevant outside the scope of a given piece of software) it makes sense to provide an extensible system where people can define their own checks without worrying about directly incorporating it into the analyzer binary. Further, a plug-in model enforces modularity in the static analyzer's logic that I think is very beneficial to its overall quality of implementation, extensibility and reusability.
I love the idea of the trac plugin as well. Annotations have their
place, but oftentimes when I start to look into a huge amount of
warnings I want to defer them instead of mark them as OK. I also want
to see any new ones that come up.
In any event I agree with Ted that the best use of someone's time
external to the project would be on issue tracking instead of actual
analysis algorithms.
I still need to sit down and digest the comments in this thread and
see if I can come up with a reasonable plan of action. If anyone out
there is available to do some of this work (for money) let me know and
I'll see if I can work you into the proposal.
Monty