I'm happy to report that after about six months, enough upper bounds have been corrected on Hackage that a Stackage build with GHC 7.8 can now proceed. I've run a build with 7.8.0rc2, and have uploaded the build.log[1] and the complete cabal output for each package[2]. The good news is that most packages are building correctly, though there is still at least one package deep in the dependency tree which does not build (pcre-light).