Podman Release v4.3.0
podman.io
podman.io
podman-compose is indeed a separate script. I had some bugs with that, but it might be fixed now.
I can't speak for it working for anything beyond basic stuff, because I haven't yet used it for anything complex.
So even though podman offers a compatible cli interface, if was no help to get compose to work.
podman-compose is a re-implementation of the docker-compose spec in a podman compatible way. Like any re-implementation, compatibility issues are possible.
The main podman project instead chose to tackle such incompatibility by implementing an optional daemon mode offering a compatible to docker REST api.
If you start de podman service on a recent version, you can use docker-compose as-is. It will happily send commands to the podman daemon and from my few initial tests, everything works perfectly so far.
Podman has fairly good support for k8s deployment configurations, which I’ve used as well, if you’re a k8s shop, but I understand there are a lot of places that have standardized on compose for development.