>>My postgresql user is the owner of the selected database, but does not
>>have permission to create databases. 
>>
>>I think the problem is here, but I don't want to give them additional
>>permissions just to initially populate the database.
>>
>>Maybe some kind of non-destructive initialization might be possible,
>>without recreating the entire database?
> 
> It's supposed IIRC. It checks to see if the db exists. If the db
> exists it tries to load the roundup schema. If that fails it
> initializes the db. But it doesn't look like you are getting that far.

It seems that I did not describe this problem quite accurately above.

Currently, when I run the 'roundup-admin initialise' command, Roudup
always prompts to recreate the database if it already exists. This
happens either way: when the database is just created, or when I run the
'roundup-admin migrate' command to add tables before performing
initialization.

It doesn't look like the command is trying to load the data before
asking to recreate the database. I looked at the admin.py code and it
seems like this is indeed the case.

Thank you for your advices about automation. I think checking if user1
exists is really the easiest thing to do. 

But it seems that using separate commands to create admin and anonymous
and then creating priorities/statuses/etc using the web interface is
easier than using initialization if I don't want to grant the CREATEDB
privilege to the postgresql role.