I'm just toying around, learning a lot, with Apache2, phpmyadmin,
mariadb, SQL in general ... absolutely don't know what I'm doing.
But I've gotten some basics accomplished; I've created a 'pma' user
in mariadb to tinker with mariadb, and have gotten ppmyadmin to open
in Firefox and show my databases, and have discovered that I can see
who my users in mariadb are with a SQL command like 'SELECT user FROM
mysql.user;'.
I wanted to browse the navigation tree in the left-hand pane of the
phpmyadmin web page, to see if I could directly see the users in the
mysql.user table (understanding that "mysql.user" is a "path" to the
"mysql" database, and the "user" table within that db).
But the "user" table is not there. I spent considerable time last
night and this morning with two AIs (Gemini, and duck.ai) trying to
make this table visible (the AI's insist the table is there, but
simply not visible for some reason), but nothing they suggested made
the table visible in the navigation tree, although the data in that
table is accessible via SQL (either through the phpmyadmin GUI, or
the mariadb cli client, or the mycli client). (The AIs also insist I
should not manipulate the user table directly, which is why it's
hidden, but I'm not worried about manipulating that data; I just want
to see the table there instead of just accepting that it's there;
besides, if I hork up my mariadb/Apache2/phpmyadmin setup, nothing is
lost; this is a throw-away setup for my learning.) The AIs seem to
think this is Debian-specific behavior.
Why can't I see this table in the navigation tree, and how do I force
the system to let me see it there?