Rename installed program

[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