OK, I've made a bit of progress here.
Again, I have very little understanding of the binary-dist system so I hope this isn't nonsense.
The utils/ghc-cabal/dist-install/build/tmp/ghc-cabal and utils/ghc-pwd/dist-install/build/tmp/ghc-pwd executables have .a extensions, which is a bug, but more importantly are built for arm and thus can't be used.
lukexi@thopminkingscape:~/Code/ghc (ghc-7.8 *=)$ file utils/ghc-cabal/dist-install/build/tmp/ghc-cabal.a
utils/ghc-cabal/dist-install/build/tmp/ghc-cabal.a: Mach-O executable arm
lukexi@thopminkingscape:~/Code/ghc (ghc-7.8 *=)$ file utils/ghc-pwd/dist-install/build/tmp/ghc-pwd.a
utils/ghc-pwd/dist-install/build/tmp/ghc-pwd.a: Mach-O executable arm
So I tried switching them to the inplace/bin/ghc-cabal and utils/ghc-pwd/dist-boot/ghc-pwd copies, respectively, with this patch:
This let me build the .tar.gz without errors, and ./configure it fine, but make install fails here now.
"inplace/bin/ghc-cabal" register libraries/ghc-prim dist-install "/usr/local/lib/arm-apple-darwin10ghc-7.8.20140129/bin/ghc" "/usr/local/lib/arm-apple-darwin10ghc-7.8.20140129/bin/ghc-pkg" "/usr/local/lib/arm-apple-darwin10ghc-7.8.20140129" '' '/usr/local' '/usr/local/lib/arm-apple-darwin10ghc-7.8.20140129' '/usr/local/share/doc/ghc/html/libraries' NO
ghc-cabal: Bad interface file: dist-install/build/GHC/CString.hi
magic number mismatch: old/corrupt interface file? (wanted 33214052, got
129742)
(looks like a missing dash in the CrossCompilePrefix as well but that's a minor issue)
Does this offer any clues?
Cheers
Luke