I tweeted this chronology and I got quite some interest, so here's a blog post with more details.

• 1998: Distutils-SIG created
• 2000: Python 1.6 with Distutils included in the stdlib
• 2000: Catalog-SIG created
• 2001: First version of the Metadata
• 2003: The Cheeseshop (poorly named PyPI, eventually)
• 2004: The Setuptools project gets a lot of traction
• 2006: The zc.buildout project is launched to deploy Zope apps
• 2007: The Virtualenv project is started
• 2008: The pip project is started
• 2008: The Distribute project (Setuptools fork) is launched.
• 2009: PEP 345, 376, 386 and 381 are accepted.
• 2010: The Distutils2 project that implements all PEPs is started. It's based on Distutils.

• 2011: Distutils2 is added in the stdlib, under the packaging name.
• 2011: I am retiring from the packaging work :)
• 2012: Packaging is removed from the stdlib, considered not matured yet. :(
• 2012: pypi-mirrors.org is launched
• 2012: Crate.io is launched
• 2012: The wheel binary format is proposed
• 2012: Distlib, a subset of Distutils2. Is launched.

The diagrams were made with Omnigraffle - under cc-by-nc. Let me know if you want the sources.