up --wait does not imply detached mode and remains attached indefinitely

[wakairo]

Describe the bug

podman-compose up --wait does not imply detached mode, despite its help text stating:

--wait  Wait for services to be running|healthy. Implies detached mode.

With a healthy, long-running service, podman-compose up --wait remains attached to the container and does not return. Adding -d makes the command behave correctly.

Docker Compose accepts docker compose up --wait, waits for the services to become running or healthy, and then returns because --wait implies detached mode.

To Reproduce

Create a directory for the reproducer:

mkdir -p /tmp/podman-compose-wait-repro
cd /tmp/podman-compose-wait-repro

Create compose.yaml:

services:
  app:
    image: busybox:latest
    command: ["sh", "-c", "sleep 3600"]
    healthcheck:
      test: ["CMD-SHELL", "true"]
      interval: 1s
      timeout: 1s
      retries: 3

The commands below explicitly use wait-repro as the Compose project name.

Run up --wait without -d:

timeout 10s podman-compose -p wait-repro \
  up --wait --wait-timeout 3

printf 'exit status: %s\n' "$?"

The command does not return after the service becomes healthy and is eventually terminated by the external timeout:

exit status: 124

Clean up:

podman-compose -p wait-repro down

As a control, run the same command with -d:

podman-compose -p wait-repro \
  up -d --wait --wait-timeout 3

printf 'exit status: %s\n' "$?"

This returns normally:

exit status: 0

Clean up again:

podman-compose -p wait-repro down

Expected behavior

podman-compose up --wait should implicitly enable detached mode, wait until the service is running or healthy, and then return status 0 while leaving the container running.

It should behave equivalently to:

podman-compose up -d --wait

This matches both the podman-compose --help description and Docker Compose behavior.

Actual behavior

Without an explicit -d, podman-compose up --wait starts the service in attached mode and waits for the long-running container process to exit.

Output

$ podman-compose version
podman-compose version 1.6.0

$ podman --version
podman version 4.9.3

Environment:

• OS: Ubuntu 24.04
• Podman: 4.9.3, rootless
• podman-compose: 1.6.0

Additional context

The --wait option is documented as implying detached mode:

https://github.com/containers/podman-compose/blob/v1.6.0/podman_compose.py#L4518-L4529

However, compose_up enters the detached code path only when args.detach is true. The readiness wait is also called only within that branch:

https://github.com/containers/podman-compose/blob/v1.6.0/podman_compose.py#L3549-L3564

Otherwise, execution proceeds to the attached code path:

https://github.com/containers/podman-compose/blob/v1.6.0/podman_compose.py#L3566-L3655

A possible fix would be to make --wait set or imply args.detach, while applying the same option compatibility checks as an explicit --detach.