It's mostly a http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2014-March/004363.html rechecked on ghc-7.8.1:

I attempted to leave original packages as-is.

Steps to reproduce:

$ cd /tmp/
$ wget -c http://code.haskell.org/~slyfox/selfcontained-eater-ghc-7.8-rc2.tar.gz
$ tar -xzf selfcontained-eater-ghc-7.8-rc2.tar.gz
$ cd selfcontained-eater-ghc-7.8-rc2
$ ./mk.sh
...
[279 of 452] Compiling Text.Highlighting.Kate.Syntax.Asp ( highlighting-kate-0.5.6.1/Text/Highlighting/Kate/Syntax/Asp.hs, highlighting-kate-0.5.6.1/Text/Highlighting/Kate/Syntax/Asp.o )
stack overflow: use +RTS -K<size> to increase it

I did prepare this testcase for ghc-7.6.3 where it failed only on last 452 module. ./mk.sh is a dumb script calling ghc -O2 + cabal-generated bits.