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.

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.