FWIW podman (sans desktop) works perfectly fine as a native back end for docker-compose as of podman v3, you just need to set the DOCKER_HOST env var.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Podman#Docker_Compose

podman-compose is less interesting since.

I'm not sure why the docs mention podman-compose, which is buggy and unmaintained.

The podman way is to write a k8s manifest and start it with `podman play kube`. Also handles configMaps and persistentVolumes.

If you really need docker-compose, podman is API-compatible with docker, so you can use the real thing on top of the podman socket.

Just do not use podman-compose.

Ok, this one is “interesting”: podman-compose have a dev brach that has some lots of things addressed, but they don’t have any recent tags and it’s not clear if they are going too. There is an issue somewhere, alluding that development is stalled because k8s is the way or similar thing.

Debian recently packaged 1.0.3 that is also old.

Hmm, this is the one that's closer to the Python docker-compose and not "docker compose" that's built into docker right now right?

Podman compose doesn't cover the whole compose spec, so no, it doesn't support it.