OpenGL debuggers and poll on front page

Just saw the poll on the front page and I really was surprised to see the results:

More online tutorials or sample code 34.2%
More reference/sample code books 20.9%
More/better debuggers 11.9%

More tutorials? The internet is flooded with tutorials (in varying quality). But with nehe and game tutorials there are at least two excellent starting points and there are quite a few site with lots of advanced tutorials (e.g. delphi3d). What else do people expect?

More books? Ok, why not.

But: Only 11.9% would like to have “more/better” debuggers! I wonder what they are referring to. There is no debugger for OpenGL I know of (So “more/better” is not really appropriate when the right term is “any”). The only rudimentary debugging aid is a glGetError. When I looked last time at Direct3D I found the debug messages of the drivers extremely useful.

So what are your OpenGL debugging strategies both for fixed pipeline and vertex/fragment programming?

So what are your OpenGL debugging strategies both for fixed pipeline and vertex/fragment programming?

Write the shaders slowly and carefully. If output is wrong, start outputting intermediate quantities to result.color to track down the problem.