I remember working somewhere where revision control actually created a mess.

I believe the problem was a combination of xenix (with limited length filenames) and sccs (which used 's.<filename>' to store each file).

Anyway, long filenames like longestpossiblename.c got checked into revision control as s.longestpossiblename where the s. prefix truncated the .c at the end

Later builds would fail since the checked out file longestpossiblename was no longer a c file and wouldn't compile.