Automatic-Module-Name was introduced as a part of JDK-8209836 and the discussion is archived in openjfx-dev mailing list which spans over 2 months under the following threads:

* http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/openjfx-dev/2018-July/022145.html
* http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/openjfx-dev/2018-August/022285.html

The change was made to support Gradle projects in Eclipse IDE.

Things to note
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1. Change was made before Gradle had any decent JPMS support
2. JavaFX plugins were not created for Maven and Gradle

Issue
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Automatic-Module-Name is not supported in jlink and it causes issue if we try to bundle a Maven project using maven-jlink-plugin. Maven adds empty jars as transitive dependency to the classpath. These empty jars have Automatic-Module-Name and are treated as modules and included in the module-path. However, jlink has no support for them and it fails.

Solution
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Automatic-Module-Name in empty jars was added as a temporary solution. Since they no longer serve any real world purpose, they should be removed.