I'm also affected by this issue using cowbuilder 0.75. Updating to 0.76 did not fix it. This did:
sudo cowbuilder --login --save-after-login # mkdir -p /home/hans/.cache Here's the error: Setting up pbuilder-satisfydepends-dummy (0.invalid.0) ... E: Could not create directory: /home/hans/.cache: boost::filesystem::create_directory: No such file or directory: "/home/hans/.cache" E: pbuilder-satisfydepends failed. To reproduce it, I did: sudo cowbuilder --login --save-after-login # rm -rf /home/hans