Comment 1 for bug 606456

Confirmed, known, long standing issue with no simple solution.

Ideally, the package installing the conflicting manpage would respect the global namespace, and add an iterator within its manpage file naming.

Search manpages.ubuntu.com for "open":
 * http://manpages.ubuntu.com/cgi-bin/search.py?cx=003883529982892832976:5zl6o8w6f0s&cof=FORID:9&ie=UTF-8&q=open&titles=Title&lr=lang_en&siteurl=manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/lucid/en/man3/open.3posix.html

There's a section 3 for open, for perl, tcl, and posix.

That's much cleaner.