config: refresh before reading a value

With the isolation of complex reads, we can now try to refresh the
on-disk file before reading a value from it.

This changes the semantics a bit, as before we could be sure that a
string we got from the configuration was valid until we wrote or
refreshed. This is no longer the case, as a read can also invalidate the
pointer.
config: document the how long the pointers are valid for