Reproduction steps

1. Download podman
2. Ensure podman's compose provider is podman-compose (most podman distros will use docker-compose as the provider if available)
3. Start Zed, open a project
4. Ensure use_podman: true is set in your settings.json file
5. Cmd-Shift-P to for projects: initialize dev container
6. Create a dev container with a docker-compose variant - Rust & PostgreSQL will work
7. Attempt to open dev container

Error is described in #53478 (comment) - in short, podman-compose has no --format=json option, which means that the Dev Container module cannot deserialize the compose files.

The solution here is to take a dependency on a YAML deserialization provider - presumably rust-yaml2 since it is a transitive dependency already - and move away from json deserialization for docker/podman-compose cases.

Current vs. Expected behavior

Current behavior: from the issue linked above, an error of the form:

2026-04-13T23:16:29-04:00 ERROR [dev_container::command_json] Error running command Command("podman" "compose" "-f" "/home/pp/Projects/test-repo/.devcontainer/docker-compose.yml" "-f" "/home/pp/Projects/test-repo/.devcontainer/docker-compose.runtime.yml" "config" "--format" "json"): Sent non-successful output; cannot deserialize. StdErr: �[4m>>>> Executing external compose provider "podman-compose". Please see podman-compose(1) for how to disable this message.

Expected behavior: Dev Container opens without issue

Zed version and system specs

Zed: v0.231.2+stable.221.cc335b70f85a17974a4c61f852dbebff8c4b1db7 (Zed)
OS: macOS 15.7.4
Memory: 18 GiB
Architecture: aarch64

Attach Zed log file

Relevant Zed settings

Relevant Keymap

(for AI issues) Model provider details

No response

If you are using WSL on Windows, what flavor of Linux are you using?

None