The directory contains: windows-flex-2.5.35.zip cygwin-1.7.5-1-src.tar.bz2 The windows-flex-2.5.35.zip file contains binaries for flex that can be used in Windows builds of Postgres, including those later than 8.4, which require a more modern version of flex than is usually available on Windows. The cygwin-1.7.5-1-src.tar.bz2 contains source code for the cygwin1.dll that is contained in the zip file. To build Postgres, you only need to download the windows-flex-2.5.35.zip file. To run this version of flex, you will need to set the M4 environment variable to point to your installation of m4. You need one of these in order to run both bison and flex, and it sometimes comes packaged with bison. If you are using this in a buildfarm member, you can set that environment variable in its config file, in the build_env stanza, something like: M4 => 'c:\path\to\bin\m4.exe',