Yeah... don't know what I was doing with the -V to python. I think I was thinking of the old autogen that did a foo --version >/dev/null 2>&1, and since python doesn't support --version...
At any rate, cleaned up the rest of this
#!/bin/sh
DIALOG=`whichdialog`
# make sure we have dialog
if[x"${DIALOG}"=x""];then
echo"Failed to find the program 'dialog' which is required to run this script!">&2
echo"">&2
echo"Please install dialog or use the standard ./configure";>&2