We were using GetConfigOption to collect the old value of each setting,
overlooking the possibility that it didn't exist yet. This does happen
in the case of adding a new entry within a custom variable class, as
exhibited in bug #6097 from Maxim Boguk.
To fix, add a missing_ok parameter to GetConfigOption, but only in 9.1
and HEAD --- it seems possible that some third-party code is using that
function, so changing its API in a minor release would cause problems.
In 9.0, create a near-duplicate function instead.