Retrieve version-string on shallow clone

Hello git@vger.kernel.org,

Two days ago I started https://github.com/mstorsjo/fdk-aac/issues/107, asking how to retrieve the fdk-aac version-string on a shallow clone. My question was of course not fdk-aac related, so Martin Storsjö suggested I'd try here. It basicly comes down to this:

git clone https://github.com/mstorsjo/fdk-aac.git [...]

git describe --tags v2.0.0-185-gcc5c85d

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/mstorsjo/fdk-aac.git

git describe --tags fatal: No names found, cannot describe anything.

The tags get lost while doing a shallow clone. I'm not an expert git user, so I was wondering if anyone could tell what my options are here. I'd figure one of these options would be to clone everything from tag v2.0.0 onward, but if so how would I do that? As another option I was thinking; maybe it's possible to do git describe --tags on the remote repo?

Thanks!

-- Reino