Nowadays I use https://github.com/fpco/minghc which can actually install network, and I've had zero problems.
Can we just include this fix into the platform installers?
Yes. MinGHC was an experiment in seeing if we could do a Windows installer that worked with Network. We can, so the platform should. However, MinGHC has a few other advantages. It provides a switcher so you can put all the switchers on your PATH and type "minghc-7.8.3" to get that version of GHC selected. Again, the platform could gain that feature. MinGHC also ships with GHC 7.2, 7.4, 7.6 and 7.8. Hopefully as soon as 7.10 is out within days we'll have a MinGHC for it. I'd also really like to start shipping MinGHC installers for GHC release candidates and even nightly GHC release candidates.
As Mark says, the Platform has decent automated build & test infrastructure so it shouldn't be that hard. As I understand it the network problem is just to do with how much of mingwin we include and not really related to "min" vs "max" installers.
Indeed, it has nothing to do with how many packages are shipped. As long as my installer ships with enough to install the packages I care about, then I don't care about min vs max. That said, all I really care is what GHC the platform includes, everything else is redundant (to me). As such having a link to a platform with each GHC version would be handy. Thanks, Neil