Once cygwin creates an entry for a user, any following changes to that user in the Win environment are not tracked. The typical issues here are names IDs. This can be fixed by editing the cygwin passwd file.
XXX what happens with users added cygwin is installed?
Does the cygwin setup setup the environment for them?
If so, is it possible to track changes to any user that way?
I think you may need to run mkpasswd again if you
make any substantial changes.
Formerly if you wanted to run cygwin things as services, either you needed to corrupt the system PATH with the cygwin paths. Or, you needed to create a user for the service which would have the proper paths. With later cygwins there is a cygrunsrv tool to run things as services. This takes care of the environment issues and simplifies thigns. However, you may still need a user for some capability related issues, since windows may not allow you to do something as a particular user, such as create authentication tokens.
All the useful documentation which used to be dumped in /
are now in /usr/share/doc/Cygwin.
This includes the info on setting up ssh, inetd
and other tools.
Older verions of cygwin treated drive names as //x/path,
where x is the drive letter.
However, this directly competes with the win32 share syntax and
causes some problems.
Later versions of cygwin migrated to /cygdrive/x/path
to map drive letters and not interfere with shares.
There is also an issue with accessing devices directly, again it
changes from version to version.
The short and sweet is that it used to use the DOS //./d:
names, but now uses simulated /dev names.
See
the history of device-special pathnames
to find out what you need to use for a particular cygwin version.