We very recently switched our P4 server to run on Windows instead of Linux. Traditionally ALL of our clients have been Windows, so we’ve ran into the case sensitivity issue a few times.
Biggest issues have been middleware (Hello Havok, I’m looking at you, and Autodesk) deciding to change a folder name to be “lowerCaseStart” to be “LowerCaseStart”. And artists changing case, until we forced all lower case on all art assets. And a few newbie programmers who weren’t used to the company naming mantra properly yet. Which is confusingly enough CamelCase for source code.
Anyway, when migrating the server from Linux to Windows, we seemed to have ended up with almost 8000 collisions (including all the branch history, so it wasn’t that bad) in about 7 years.
Double-checking all the real conflicts (cpp, h, cs, py, etc files) took a few days, for all the rest of the case sensitivity collisions we decided to branch into //depot/collisions as lower case and just nuked everything except the newest revisions (.psd, .max etc).
But, if you EVER switch your Perforce server OS and need to migrate the database over - prepare for a lot of emails sent over with Perforce support and several dry runs, with a bunch of script hacks for rename (aka integrate) of the assets.
After the migration to running the server on a Windows machine, it’s been fairly smooth.
We were aware of the ability to continue running the server on a Linux machine with a case-insensitive file system, but that sounded even more scary than migrating it over to Windows.
I think the rule of thumb is that keep the server on the same OS as most of the clients.
SamiV.