Documentation: How to release changes to older minors

[JReinhold]

What I did

Added a section to RELEASING.md on how to make changes to older minors, eg. releasing critical bugfixes.

Checklist for Contributors

Testing

The changes in this PR are covered in the following automated tests:

• stories
• unit tests
• integration tests
• end-to-end tests

Manual testing

This section is mandatory for all contributions. If you believe no manual test is necessary, please state so explicitly. Thanks!

Documentation

• Add or update documentation reflecting your changes
• If you are deprecating/removing a feature, make sure to update
  MIGRATION.MD

Checklist for Maintainers

• When this PR is ready for testing, make sure to add ci:normal, ci:merged or ci:daily GH label to it to run a specific set of sandboxes. The particular set of sandboxes can be found in code/lib/cli/src/sandbox-templates.ts

• Make sure this PR contains one of the labels below:

  Available labels

  • bug: Internal changes that fixes incorrect behavior.
  • maintenance: User-facing maintenance tasks.
  • dependencies: Upgrading (sometimes downgrading) dependencies.
  • build: Internal-facing build tooling & test updates. Will not show up in release changelog.
  • cleanup: Minor cleanup style change. Will not show up in release changelog.
  • documentation: Documentation only changes. Will not show up in release changelog.
  • feature request: Introducing a new feature.
  • BREAKING CHANGE: Changes that break compatibility in some way with current major version.
  • other: Changes that don't fit in the above categories.

🦋 Canary release

This PR does not have a canary release associated. You can request a canary release of this pull request by mentioning the @storybookjs/core team here.

core team members can create a canary release here or locally with gh workflow run --repo storybookjs/storybook canary-release-pr.yml --field pr=<PR_NUMBER>

Greptile Summary

Let me provide a clear and concise summary of this documentation-focused PR:

Added comprehensive documentation for releasing patches to older minor versions of Storybook, detailing the manual release process when the latest version isn't the target.

• Added new section "Releasing changes to older minor versions" in CONTRIBUTING/RELEASING.md
• Provided step-by-step instructions for manually releasing patches (e.g. v8.3.7 when 8.4.0 is current)
• Included critical details about npm permissions, version tagging, and CI workflow
• Documented changelog synchronization between branches for version tracking
• Added guidance for creating GitHub releases for older versions

This documentation fills an important gap in the release process documentation, helping maintainers handle critical backported fixes.

[greptile-apps]

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[jonniebigodes]

@JReinhold thanks for taking the time to put together this pull request and help with the documentation. Appreciate it 🙏 ! I left some items for you to look into when you can.

Let me know, and we'll go from there.