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.