Your diligence is appreciated. I’m familiar with bash-org-archive and qdb.lol; the problem is searching them. I hadn’t considered looking through them locally, but it’s a good idea.

Admittedly I am fallible, so it isn’t impossible I saw the quote elsewhere, but more likely I’m misremembering the quote referencing Gentoo. Perhaps it was about Arch or even just generally about compiling software. I’m pretty sure the quote referenced xchess, so perhaps that would be more helpful to grep.

Either way, thank you for making the effort to find it.