Versioning CI Templates

Description

GitLab CI Templates can help users get started with GitLab CI. However, once you have those templates, especially if it is more complicated then a static site generator, how would you go about notifying users when you make updates to the template? Is there something that GitLab can do to provide a way to do this?

Currently we have a mix of .gitlab-ci.yml & Ansible playbooks to deploy AWS Elastic Beanstalk apps. I have an example repository that I build/update with new features/bug fixes but I don't have a great way of versioning this other than throwing a version number in the files header so I can tell on each project that is using it what "version" of the example repo they built off of.

Is there anything GitLab might be able to do to help? It's kind of weird is your kind of meta-versioning your code inside a git repo but I can see this being more of a problem with larger organizations who want better standardization around projects. I think other tools would abstract these build steps away from users to have better enforcement, but that fly's in the face of keeping the CI/CD code with the repo.

This also gets into making GitLab's built in Templates easier to manipulate for larger organizations. I don't think there is anyway for me to add my own templates to the template drop down.

Links / references

Someone else had asked something like this on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/647yie/your_ci_build_process_should_be_in_your_code/dg09vuj/