Getting bluetooth networking on gentoo was a pain to figure out

Initial debugging

When setting up a bluetooth device with bt-network --connect "phone name here" nap, and then typing in nmcli, I was getting a plugin missing message under the bluetooth interface in red text.

$ nmcli
bnep0: unmanaged
        "Intel 0a2b"
        bluetooth (unknown), 01:23:45:67:89:AB, plugin missing, sw, mtu 1500

Executable debug mode

I then started investigating the debug logs of networkmanager

$ NetworkManager --debug --log-level=DEBUG --plugins=bluetooth
...
<warn>  [1551316482.0957] settings: could not load plugin 'bluetooth' from file '/usr/lib64/NetworkManager/1.14.4/libnm-settings-plugin-bluetooth.so': No such file or directory
...

On further investigation of the source code, --plugins=bluetooth is not the way to do this and the correct file path is /usr/lib64/NetworkManager/1.14.4/libnm-device-plugin-bluetooth.so

It turns out, even though I was compiling networkmanager with USE flags bluetooth (on gentoo), the file /usr/lib64/NetworkManager/1.14.4/libnm-device-plugin-bluetooth.so was not getting created because the build process requires modemmanager

NetworkManager $ grep -r libnm-settings-plugin-bluetooth.so
Makefile.in:@WITH_MODEM_MANAGER_1_TRUE@	$(srcdir)/tools/check-exports.sh $(builddir)/src/devices/bluetooth/.libs/libnm-device-plugin-bluetooth.so "$(srcdir)/linker-script-devices.ver"
Makefile.in:@WITH_MODEM_MANAGER_1_TRUE@	$(call check_so_symbols,$(builddir)/src/devices/bluetooth/.libs/libnm-device-plugin-bluetooth.so)

Fix

So the fix was merely adding the USE flag modemmanager, USE=modemmanager emerge net-misc/networkmanager fixes this issue, but this is not clear at all.

After doing a bit more research, found a bug report detailing this problem exactly here. What I would do for better SEO on the bug reporter.

Additional symptoms

I started dealing with these problems after attempting to press the "Network Access Point" button on the blueman-manager application, resulting in a python traceback

blueman-manager 20.25.52 WARNING  ManagerDeviceMenu:157 err       : disconnect failed g-io-error-quark: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Python.TypeError: Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib64/python3.6/site-packages/dbus/service.py", line 707, in _message_cb
    retval = candidate_method(self, *args, **keywords)
  File "/usr/lib64/python3.6/site-packages/blueman/main/DbusService.py", line 32, in wrapper
    return method(*args[1:], **kwargs)
  File "/usr/lib64/python3.6/site-packages/blueman/plugins/applet/DBusService.py", line 99, in disconnect_service
    if not self.parent.Plugins.run_ex("service_disconnect_handler", cb, service, ok, err):
  File "/usr/lib64/python3.6/site-packages/blueman/main/PluginManager.py", line 217, in run_ex
    ret = getattr(inst, func)(*args, **kwargs)
  File "/usr/lib64/python3.6/site-packages/blueman/plugins/applet/NMPANSupport.py", line 33, in service_disconnect_handler
    conn.deactivate()
  File "/usr/lib64/python3.6/site-packages/blueman/main/NetworkManager.py", line 113, in deactivate
    self.client.deactivate_connection_async(self.active_connection, None, on_connection_deactivate)
TypeError: Argument 1 does not allow None as a value
 (36)

Wierd stuff