I believe I've worked around the issues with make binary-dist and cross-compilation.

This should be a working binary for iOS devices 

https://github.com/ghc-ios/ghc-ios-scripts/releases/download/7.8-rc1-device/ghc-7.8.20140129-arm-apple-ios.tar.bz2

Please try ./configure && make install (it should live happily next to your current ghc as arm-apple-darwin10-ghc) and let me know so we can have a build ready for 7.8 RC2!

Cheers

Luke