Rename program during installation

[Andrew In]

Hello.

We have an application written in Python that uses automake. We have all
our source code in a directory called src/programname. We also have a small
launcher called src/programname.py.in which is transformed into
src/programname.py during "compilation." With this setup the program is
installed in lib and the launcher in bin.

The problem is that the launcher is installed as programname.py. We would
like to install it as just programname.

We can't rename the launcher in the source tree because then the name will
clash with the name of the Python package. So we're asking if there's a way
to remove the .py suffix from the launcher during the installation phase?

We are busy reading the documentation, but are somewhat stuck on this one.
We have looked at a few other Python projects with similar setup and they
all seam to get around it by using different names for the package and for
the launcher. We would like to avoid that if possible.

Andrew