I'm not OP, but the whole podman compose topic gets quite confusing, as initially Podman didn't seem to know what they were trying to do. I've given some more context around it in previous comments.

You shouldn't be using podman compose. It's flimsy and doesn't work very well (at least it was last time I used it prior to Podman v3), and I'm pretty sure it doesn't have Red Hat's direct support.

Instead, activate Podman's Docker API compatibility socket, and simply set your `DOCKER_HOST` env var to that socket, and from there you can use your general docker client commands such as `docker`, `docker compose` and anything else that uses the Docker API. There are very few things that don't work with this, and the few things that don't are advanced setups.

For what it's worth, podman has also a thin wrapper (podman compose) which executes `docker-compose` or the old `podman-compose`. The docs should explain which it picks.

Note:

- `podman-compose` is an early attempt at remaking `docker-compose` v1 but for Podman. This used parsed the compose config and converts them to podman commands, and executes it.

- Later Podman wrote a Docker compatible socket instead, which can work with most docker clis that accept a `DOCKER_HOST` argument, including `docker` and `docker-compose` (both v1 and v2)

- `podman compose` is a thin wrapper that automatically selects `docker-compose` or `podman-compose` depending on which is installed.

Generally all you need is podman, docker-compose (the v2 binary), and that's it. From there you can use `podman` and/or `podman compose`.