The nightly tarball is being sort of generated. I just put an updated one in there.
I've been having trouble tracking down where the problem is. I don't think it caused by the much-needed update I made on the machine.
What should happen is that sdm would export a copy of every project for which cvs settings have been entered into data/sdm-source/. Then another proc would tar that up and put it in data/sdm-nightly-build. The second part is working, it's the first that isn't.