At present this function returns 1 on success and 0 on failure. But in
the latter case it provides no indication of what went wrong.
If an attempt is made to delete a non-existent variable, the caller may
want to ignore this error. This happens when setting a non-existent
variable to "", for example.
Update the function to return 0 on success and a useful error code on
failure. Add a function comment too.
Make sure that env_set() does not return an error if it is deleting a
variable that doesn't exist. We could update env_set() to return useful
error numbers also, but that is beyond the scope of this change.