strange warning sign relating to storage manager

Hello All,
I've been doing some extensive modifications of the storage manager (md.c)
in postgres. My code all compiles just fine, but when i run initdb, i
receive the following output:

"creating template1 database in /home/accts/wdc22/pgdata/base/1 ... ok
initializing pg_authid ... WARNING: no roles are defined in this database
system
HINT: You should immediately run CREATE USER "wdc22" SUPERUSER;.
FATAL: database "template1" does not exist
child process exited with exit code 1"

I've searched around for what this means, but I can't find anything. My
guess is that the system creates template1 and writes it to disk, but an
issue occurs on reading it back out (or it was written badly, but no error
was thrown). Can anyone help give me some insight into what is happening
here and why I'm getting these weird errors?

Sincerely,
Will Childs-Klein