I have discovered that what happened is that last night I recompiled postfix in order to add a needed feature to make it work in some situations that previously it did not.  I was missing a necessary library on the system when I first compiled it and this caused it to omit adding that feature.

     What I did not realize at the time was that installing the newly compiled version would rudely overwrite my existing configuration files.

     I can not boot the backup because init, the master daemon is damaged.  So I am trying to extract the configuration files from the backup.