How to use AssetDatabase.StartAssetEditing & StopAssetEditing?

I have a set of packages that I need to import to a project programmatically, as a batch. But when attempting to do this using ImportPackage(), only the last package in the list is actually imported. The docs specify that AssetDatabase incorporates two methods that appear to address my requirements - AssetDatabase.StartAssetEditing and .StopAssetEditing, which “lets you group several asset imports together into one larger import”.

How are these to be used? - how do you accomplish batch importing to a Unity project?

I’ve tried surrounding the batch calls as follows, but they’ve had no effect.

e.g.

AssetDatabase.StartAssetEditing();

foreach ( p in packages ){
  AssetDatabase.ImportPackage( p , false );
}

AssetDatabase.StopAssetEditing();

The docs say it let you import several assets, not packages. ImportPackage and ImportAsset are two different functions.

What happens if you get rid of StartAssetEditing and StopAssetEditing?