Our docs state that building WiredTiger only requires CMake and a semi-recent C11 compiler. In reality, a complete development setup also requires Python, Git, SWIG, the LLVM toolchain, and a few other things.

We should add an optional .devcontainer configuration (including a Dockerfile) to the repo to serve as a reference for a minimal development environment. This will provide a reproducible and isolated setup without cluttering host system packages.

While this does not replace the official Evergreen workstations, it gives people the option of a batteries-included, no-thinking-required local development environment. It also helps validate that WiredTiger can be built with basic open-source tools, which is useful for the open-source community who lack access to our internal workstation images.

The MongoDB repo already does something similar here for reference: https://github.com/10gen/mongo/blob/master/.devcontainer/Dockerfile