Late to the party…

A simple wrapper to close over period and unit is no risk to joda or java 8.  Many users won't have access to java 8, and I have no idea what the android answer to java 8 will be, if any.

There are indeed many types like this for different reasons.  Ex. @brianm 's one that is mainly a helper to parse the unit from an encoded string.

https://github.com/brianm/config-magic/blob/master/src/main/java/org/skife/config/TimeSpan.java

My 2p: if usability improvements will be blocked until we have something like this, let's not kite till java8, as that only helps some users.