diff --git a/setupsrc/pypdfium2_setup/build_pdfium.py b/setupsrc/pypdfium2_setup/build_pdfium.py
index 0637d633d..41341caf8 100755
--- a/setupsrc/pypdfium2_setup/build_pdfium.py
+++ b/setupsrc/pypdfium2_setup/build_pdfium.py
@@ -103,8 +103,11 @@ def dl_pdfium(GClient, do_update, revision):
     
     if is_sync:
         # TODO consider passing -D ?
-        # FIXME Have to use --with-branch-heads, and unable to use --shallow --no-history because of versioning. This probably makes checkout *much* slower, but not sure how to properly get the version heads afterwards. If we just fetch a fixed number of commits, the versions do appear in git log but land in the remotes refspace, which confuses git describe.
-        run_cmd([GClient, "sync", "--revision", f"origin/{revision}", "--with_branch_heads"], cwd=SBDir)
+        run_cmd([GClient, "sync", "--revision", f"origin/{revision}", "--no-history", "--shallow"], cwd=SBDir)
+        # quick & dirty fix to make a version annotated commit available - pdfium gets versioned very frequently, so this should be more than enough
+        # TODO tighten to check out only up to the latest tag
+        # FIXME the repository is still left in a very confusing state - maybe we should just drop --no-history --shallow for simplicity?
+        run_cmd(["git", "fetch", "--depth=100"], cwd=PDFiumDir)
     
     return is_sync