This method was added in 9e1616307c4c. AFAICT it didn't do anything at
inception. If it did, there was no test coverage for it because
changing it to raise doesn't fail any tests at that revision.
b6e71f8af5b8 later refactored all remote.batch() calls to
remote.iterbatch(). So if this was somehow used, it isn't called
any more because there are no calls to .batch() remaining in the
repo.
I suspect the original patch author got confused by the distinction
between the peer/remote interface and the largefiles store. The lf
store is a gateway to a peer instance. It exposes additional
lf-specific methods to execute against a peer. However, it is not
a peer and doesn't need to implement batch() because peer itself
does that.