I just tried building the Debian source of the openmpi 1.4.3-2.1 package in pbuilder using the latest libibvers 1.1.5-1, and the build completed successfully. It's going to be hard to figure out what went wrong in your setup without more specific information.
Is it possible that you configured your Open MPI source tree against an older libibverbs package (that did provide the .la), and then the generated Makefiles were left behind referring to the file that is not in newer libibverbs packages? -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org