Uwe,
Thanks for the feedback. We have definitely been looking at and thinking about how to ingest Compose yaml. The biggest challenge is standardization. There's no open standard for Compose. Even though it's easy to use, it's basically a trap in that it leads you down a path for multi-container orchestration that is only used by Docker Inc. Everybody else is standardizing on Kube yaml, and that appears to be the direction of the future (even though people are still adopting Compose because it's easy). Basically, we have a race condition where some people are adopting Compose, or already have Compose yaml, and the rest of the world is moving to Kube yaml. Compose yaml is easier, Kubernetes is more powerful.
It's a really, really tough situation and one of our #1 requests from the community. We took a deep look, talked about it a LOT, and decided that "podman generate kube" and "podman play kube" was the closest we could come to giving users:
1. something easy
2. Something compatible with where the world is going
3. Bridges the gap getting from "podman run" to "kubectl create -f kube.yaml" (which admittedly is painful for a lot of people)
4. Follows open standards
5. Doesn't leave people on a dead end path
All that said, we are still looking at the possibility of a "podman play compose" which would obviously give you an easier path from Compose to Kube. The problem is, that sounds really, really good, but it's much harder to do in reality :-) We need a really good Compose library, and a way to translate that will be sane. Mileage will definitely vary if we ever implement that solution...
Best Regards
Scott M