HI Matej, many thanks for the comment on the GH issue.

Indeed, for versions 1.16.x we continue to build this against healpix_cxx packaged for openSUSE (I packaged it specifically for this one purpose), but healpy 1.17.x depends on an unreleased version of healpix (3.83 whereas 3.82 is latest upstream release), thereby making it imperative that we build the bundled healpix instead.

For the current version of healpy in d:l:p:n, you will notice the following in the logs, indicating the use of system installed healpix_cxx:

[   22s]   checking if library 'healpix_cxx' is installed
[   22s]   found 'healpix_cxx' installed, using it

However, for healpy 1.17.3, the log goes:

[   20s]   checking if library 'healpix_cxx' is installed
[   20s]   Package dependency requirement 'healpix_cxx >= 3.83.0' could not be satisfied.
[   20s]   Package 'healpix_cxx' has version '3.82.0', required version is '>= 3.83.0'
[   20s]   building library 'healpix_cxx' from source

So, for now, this is only a problem until healpix_cxx 3.83 is released but who knows what trunk revision of the lib will be needed by healpy by the time that happens.